Flicker of Flight

Flicker of Flight began with a family visit to a butterfly exhibit just before my mom’s birthday. In the butterfly room, where visitors could walk among the butterflies, two of them stood out to me. Their wing patterns felt different from any I had noticed before, and almost immediately I knew I wanted to turn that moment into my next painting.

Rather than painting the wings realistically, I wanted to give them a more modern, abstract feeling. The colors still come from the world of real butterflies, but the patterns were opened up and reimagined so the piece could feel less like a study and more like a memory of movement.

I also chose to invert one wing against the other. That shift makes the painting less fixed: there is no single correct way to look at it, and it can even be turned vertically. I like that the composition asks the viewer to adjust, to notice change, and to let the image become something new from another direction.