Matthew 10:29 “What is the price of two sparrows–one copper coin? But not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.”
Sparrows and small birds first came to my attention several years ago. I remember the “aha” moment exactly. I had just gotten into my car in a parking lot (I had been in a Michael’s store, but I have no idea why.) It was a rainy, gray day and the little trees in the parking lot were completely naked, bare of leaves. But as I sat in my car, getting my keys in the ignition, a little sparrow sitting in the tiny naked tree in front of me caught my eye.
It seemed to just be sitting there staring at me, not flying away as I might have expected, and this thought came into my mind, “God is watching that little sparrow there!” I have no idea why that thought came to me, maybe I had read the passage in Matthew recently or had heard someone mention it, but then it came to me. I could put sparrows into my artwork, just a little reminder to myself that no matter how crazy life was feeling, how much I felt that nobody cared, certainly not God, it just wasn’t true and that little bird sitting in that tree was telling me so.
Not long after that, I started sketching little birds and adding them to the collages that I was doing. I didn’t tell anyone why at first, it was my little personal note to myself, but then people started noticing and asking, “What’s with the birds?” So I shared how I used them to remind myself about how God was watching over each of us.
A couple of years later, as I was walking my dogs one day, I noticed a dead baby bird that had fallen from an unseen nest in a tree overhead onto the sidewalk. I couldn’t have missed it if I had tried, like it was put there just for me to discover. Fascinated, I took a good look and a photo with my phone and started walking on. Then I turned around (good thing my dogs are used to this crazy behavior.) Since I was on a walk with my dogs, I had plenty of plastic bags handy and used one to scoop up the dead bird and take it home to photograph in a more controlled setting.
I didn’t even know what I was going to use those photographs for at first, maybe as smaller elements in my landscape works. It didn’t really matter, it was simply the fallen sparrow mentioned in Matthew and I needed to photograph it. And then I kept finding dead birds, and so did my friends and family, who were kind enough to let me know and even bring them to me.
And so Specimina began.