Spaightwood Galleries, Inc.

The Madison Series of mixed media works on paper combining monotype, acrylic paint, oil stick, pastel, and other media (spmetimes including melted crayons) sponsored by Galeria Joan Prats and Spaightwood Galleries, came about when the late Wayne Taylor, Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the possessor of a large-bed printing press, met Bird at our first Madison showing of his works in 1982. They quickly became friends and the possibility of a project at Taylor's Stoughton WI studio became a reality in 1987, thanks to the enthusiasm of Dorothy Cater, Jim's wife and the director of Galeriea Joan Prat's New York office, for the project. Their collaboration produced an outpouring of works which pleased everyone concerned so much that they scheduled a repeat for 1988. Many of the works were shown (and sold) at Galeria Joan Prats NY, Galeria Joan Prats Barcelona, and several International Art Fairs at venues including the Chicago Navy Pier, Barcelona, Paris, and London; although we have also shown a number of these works in shows, most of the pieces on this page were on reserve in our own collection for many years and are offered here for the first time on our website.

Bird’s works frequently illustrate Motherwell’s insistence that sometimes the artist is privileged to be “an expresser of adoration for the miracle of a world that has colors, meaningful shapes, as spaces that may exhibit the real expansion of the human spirit as it moves and has its being.” Bird's works frequently depict what he calls “Landscapes of the Mind,” most often keyed to his memories and feelings about Spain, but all concerned with the space in which the human spirit creates to discover its freedom. As Bird said in a 1990 essay for a show at Galeria Joan Prats, his longtime dealer, "If one accepts the premise that art can be the mirror within which we may see ourselves, then the quest should be to get the glass true. The problem is that it never is quite true and the image we see is distorted, but, before dismissing one mirror for another, judgment should be suspended, as mostly the unconscious reach is greater than the conscious grasp. It is obvious that great art has its source at some point beyond conscious striving, and if this fount is to become accessible it requires an act of faith on the part of the artist to do “nothing” and to allow the dreaming and fantasizing, that least understood part of the creative endeavor, to take place, the space in which the wretchedness of the human condition is re-composed and put into an acceptable form."