Stacy Slaten – Nesting – Artist Statement

Nesting: Drawings by Stacy Slaten

Artist Statement

Stacy and Liberty

In the world of parrot ownership, we use the word “bonding” a lot. By definition, bonding means to “establish a relationship with someone based on shared feelings, interests, or experiences” but we parrot lovers know that it means much more than that. The level of bonding we share with our parrots speaks to the amount of trust we have earned. It is the thing that allows our parrots to forgive us for the mistakes we make. Bonding is evident every time they cuddle up against our bodies and fall fast asleep without reservation.

Bonding is the goal we aim for with our parrots, preferably not to the unrealistic level of a mate, but more resembling a connection much like a parent or family member. For the right person, they can make fascinating and marvelous companions similar in feel to our human friends. I have lived with one myself the past eighteen years.

        I am investigating these connections, both with people and parrots, using their bird forms to symbolize and discuss the human need for connection while highlighting the nature of parrots. These snapshots of life with birds come from the use of my own parrot, and from friendships in my life, in the use of their parrots. The images are also a reinvestigation of traditional drawing skills not unlike the traditional portrait qualities of the atelier method. The slow buildup of form and value has a meditative quality that allows me a space to contemplate these portraits and connections, of parrots and people.

     

Nesting #19, 16″ x 12″, 2020

  I also want to forge a conversation about the nature of keeping an intelligent wild animal as a companion while still highlighting their obvious beauty and variety of form. People respond to that beauty, as I do, unfortunately making impulse purchases. Due though to their high level of cognitive abilities, social needs, lack of common knowledge in care and long lifespan of 30-80 years or more, a great number of parrots can develop problem behaviors like self-destruction. In 1998 the World Parrot Trust stated that perhaps as many as 50% of all companion parrots were kept in cramped and inadequate conditions. I am hoping to draw awareness to the challenges, opportunities and joys these sensitive “fids,” feathered kids, bring to human lives through their drawn images.

        The conversation lead by drawing is a philosophy of seeing. It is a way of knowing a subject through labor and practice. Through this labor and practice, I want to draw as sensitively and accurately the joy connection brings to our lives, through these parrots and people.

Artist Biography 

Stacy Slaten is an Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting and the Gallery Director at Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria, Virginia. Her drawings are exhibited nationally across the country from galleries and museums such as Five Points Gallery, Torrington, CT; Impasto Art Gallery, Longmont, CO; Las Laguna Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA; Ellen Noel Art Museum, Odessa, TX to local places like Del Ray Artisans Gallery, Alexandria, VA and Vienna Arts Society, Vienna, VA.

She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Drawing and Painting, another in Jewelry Design and Metalsmithing, and one in Human Sciences at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, where she is from. She then earned a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Currently, she lives in Alexandria with her parrot and continues to investigate drawing as a primary expression.

Follow Stacy on Instagram at @StacySlaten

Visit Stacy’s artist website at StacyJSlaten.com 

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