Uccello is the Italian work for bird. In 2016, a woodpecker (picchio) decided that it absolutely had to get inside the front room of our home in Umbria. So it grabbed onto the chestnut travi or lintel over a window and started to peck its way in. Chestnut is incredibly hard and requires an immense amount of work to break through.
We had trimmed some pine trees around our house and a roof tile broke and needed replacing. So our trusted man, Serafino, assembled the scaffolding and as he climbed past he looked into the window below the broken tile. There is a bird inside the house.
The house is entirely closed up with only this one set of shutters open. If you have ever try to get a bird out of your house, you must darken the inside and open a door as they will always go towards the light. Serafino immediately went inside and opened the window and freed the bird. Ever after that room seemed like the perfect place in which to paint and photograph. The freedom continues to be incredible.
These paintings are about the prisons we make for ourselves. They are about the amount of work we will do to achieve a goal only to find that the very thing that we think we can’t live without actually imprisons us.