Rebirth - Collage

Here I wanted to present not just the cycle of life, but also how our soul goes through the same cycle many times in our lifetime when we go from being sad or depressed to being active and ecstatic.
So the boy that finds the dead bird in the forest suddenly stops to think about his own fragile life, and is then reminded of the beauty of life as a flock of birds gracefully takes flight from a nearby tree into a deep blue sky dotted with stars.

Rebirth - Mixed media collage (16x20 in)

This is an homage to my aunt Teresa Gancedo who was an influence on me as a child as the walls of my childhood home were covered with her paintings and drawings. She likes to use a lot of symbols in her work, And I remember seeing all sorts of objects on her paintings such as feathers, dead birds, sticks, or roses. The paintings from her that I saw as a child always emanated mystery and a tinge of the occult. She achieves this feeling not just from the use of symbols but from the different textures and multiple layers her paintings have.

I used burnt sienna and phthalo blue and collaged the items first with polycrylic.

The music at the bottom is the Adagietto from Mahler's 5th Symphony which is one of my mother's favorite pieces and is also something I remember listening to with her in the music room as a child.
The music at the top is the violin solo from Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending which is inspired on a poem by George Meredith of which I quote the last lines below:

Wherefore their soul in me, or mine,
Through self-forgetfulness divine,
In them, that song aloft maintains,
To fill the sky and thrill the plains
With showerings drawn from human stores,
As he to silence nearer soars,
Extends the world at wings and dome,
More spacious making more our home,
Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.