Song Sparrow Singing in the Boston Public Garden

By Michael Glier

Piece description from the artist

It was morning rush hour when I pushed through the glass doors of a hotel in downtown Boston and set out for the Public Garden. When I arrived, the glory of the garden was all the more striking to me for having traversed the city street. Reflexively, I took a deep breath, and then I sat down to look, listen and draw. Before putting pencil to paper, I took an inventory of my senses to register the fullness of the place. I closed my eyes, and noted what I heard (traffic, conversations and bird songs), what I felt on my skin (the slats of a bench pressing into my back and the coolness of spring, a little damp, but warming in the sun), and what I smelled (daffodils and Dunkin Donuts!). Then I opened my eyes and saw a green space in which a delightful variety of people moved at different speeds along paths designed in a different era.

I’d come here specifically to draw the sounds of the birds of the Boston Public Garden. For a few decades now my artwork has been motivated by the rupture between humankind and the natural world and the environmental destruction that flows from this self-inflicted wound. The bird songs which persist in urban spaces like the Public Garden, however, are testaments to unity. Each “doo doo, dee dee” and “twit twit” that resonates off the pavement and brick of the city is a song of reconciliation that says nature and culture are not separate things, but are a single entity, the living world.

The language of music and art overlap, so it’s not too difficult to translate sound into image. As a bird call rises and falls, so does the hand. As the sound increases, so does the size of the mark. Round sounds are drawn as ample loops with a soft hand, and sharp, raspy sounds are made with pointed and short marks drawn with clenched fingers. If the song is simple, so is the mark, and if the song is inventive and unpredictable, so is the picture. My artwork is not a protest or an exposition. It is instead a record of simple exchanges between me and other living things. In this case it is an attempt to visualize the sounds of birds and to include them into paintings of a thriving city scene.