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.
Mike Glier makes drawings and paintings about the human relationship with the environment. A recipient of a National Endowment Fellowship in drawing, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting, Glier has had solo exhibitions at Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston; Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York; Gerald Peters Gallery, New York and Santa Fe; and the Museum of Modern Art, NY. The Drawing Center, NY, The Tyler Gallery, Philadelphia, and the Opalka Gallery, Albany NY, have sponsored national touring exhibitions and he has participated in the Whitney Museum Biennial, NY. Glier has exhibited internationally at the Lisson Gallery, London; Tanya Grunert Gallery, Cologne; American Graffiti, Amsterdam; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; and in 2019 was an Artist in Residence at Hauser and Wirth Gallery, Somerset, England.
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