{"title":"Megan Drumm","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg style=\"max-height: 300px; max-width:55%\" src=\"https:\/\/helloart-prod-bucket.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com\/media\/artist\/megan-drumm\/megan-drumm-profile.jpg\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBaltimore‑based painter Megan creates work shaped by movement, observation, and the subtle emotional currents of daily life. Often traveling across the city, she finds her attention repeatedly drawn to the small songbirds that punctuate the urban landscape, fragile, quick, and easily overlooked. These encounters form the heart of her practice. \r\u003cbr\u003eMegan’s process begins with shifting fields of muted color, allowing mood and intuition to guide her before the birds appear. Her brushwork moves from soft blending to sudden, decisive marks, capturing the fleeting quality of the moments she witnesses. Through this interplay of realism and abstraction, she explores themes of memory, transformation, and the quiet spaces where emotion gathers. Her work honors the delicate, the transient, and the unseen forces that shape our inner lives.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch4\u003eARTIST’S STATEMENT\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs an artist I create my observations and emotions, as a person I feel I am silently witness to the world around me. Watching carefully and openly. Throughout my day I travel a lot, moving from place to place, being swept amongst the busy commotion of life. Yet amid the hustle of the everyday slows the moment I catch a glimpse of the small forgettable song birds along the streets. I am in awe of the delicate nature of these creatures, how light their feathers are, how quick their bursts of motions. They speak to me as if they know me. As a painter I capture these quick silent moments of connections with the song birds, using faded or muted colors to interpret the silence and the almost blurry interactions that occur in my head when met with these moments. While painting my brushwork shifts from slow to swift, echoing the birds’ fleeting movements. Pushing the oil paint around until I am satisfied with the encapsulated mood. The oil paint feels fragile and soft as I blend and reduce its viscosity, a similar fragility to that of my observation of the bird's delicate frames wrapped in feathers.\r\u003cbr\u003e\r\u003cbr\u003e\r\u003cbr\u003eThe recurring subject of birds throughout my work helps me to describe a sense of liminality; The moments, spaces and states that cross boundaries between the defined. Birds are that of the land and of the sky and all between. They view the world through a lens we can only imagine or capture through the distorted lens of a camera set up in just the right way that we would associate with that of a bird's view. Birds are the spirits of the sky, visiting us at their own pleasure. The ambiguity of liminality is what intrigues me, the unknown of where one is or one might go, or what\/who they are and what\/who they may become. I have thought deeply of birds in this way, how they can be interpreted as lost spirits or the souls of loved ones paying visit to the ones still walking the earth, transcending one state to another. \r\u003cbr\u003e\r\u003cbr\u003e\r\u003cbr\u003eThrough the exploration of Liminality and birds I have found myself painting in a manner that is between two of my practices, that of realism and that of the abstract. I find myself trying to bridge the different styles of my practice while staying loyal to the image of the song bird that captivates that feeling in such a way. I start with the background, a color field that consists of a mix of colors situated in warm or cool. Mudding the colors and mixing them around as the emotions tumble through my mind, Once I feel satisfied or exhausted by this process I step back. I allow myself the courtesy of time with the background. Taking in the mix of colors and observing the mood they create before I determine the composition above. Once the urge strikes and the birds fly into view I am ready to begin the addition of my subject, the subject that holds me so tightly grounded to my art. I paint the birds with as much or as little detail that feels necessary for each composition, sometimes bouncing in the in-between of both spaces. I sit back away from the painting for a while, contemplating the mood and repetitively adding or subtracting elements, finding myself stuck in that in-between space with them, still grasping for the final destination that may never come.\r\u003cbr\u003e\r\u003cbr\u003eFor me, I paint to find words. I paint to find meaning and to soothe my soul. These paintings of these little forgettable birds create a space for them to be appreciated and for me to find meaning in my art. I could talk about their Mythology to no end. There are over 18,000 bird species, many of which hold a spiritual or philosophical meaning behind them. But that is not what is important, or what holds me with them for so long. They hold a deeper, more personal meaning to me; that of my own inner conflict, that of resolution. The space they hold and don't hold, the transitionality that feels freeing and yet constraintive. These paradoxes of such a free spirit hold me in despair and awe, and yet it feels so simple, so applicable to the complexities of a human being that I feel compelled to paint them over and over again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"birds-at-tea","title":"Bird's at Tea","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOil on canvas.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e48x30x1.20\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Megan Drumm","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43858359287911,"sku":null,"price":1255.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0063\/3038\/4487\/files\/1_1780691390_59585.jpg?v=1780935678"},{"product_id":"fabric-nest","title":"Fabric Nest","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOil on 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