Pigeon 

Bailey Harberg, Street Species, 2013. Gouache and watercolor on paper, 24 x 18 in.

I had a lot of people asking me "Why are you drawing a pigeon?" when I started this. My response was, "Why not?" In my opinion, one of art's most important roles in society is to make people happy, and every time I look at this it makes me smile. After I finished it, as a trained art historian I realized that it probably has all sorts of other twenty-first century environmental and societal implications and that's all fine and good; I probably wouldn't disagree with any of those readings. What this really came down to for me was irony, flipping people's expectations about art upside down, and fun. The idea of glorifying such an everyday, mundane bird that no one normally looks twice at also appealed to me.  Still, I'm mainly putting this out into the world this morning because I want people to look at it and smirk because this little guy is pretty cute.