“The Bird of Paradise” was made at the beginning a period of transition, it is part of the last collection of works I made in acrylic. It was inspired by a recommendation by a Mi’kmaq Elder, Noel Milliea, to paint an owl, which lead to my eventually painting all of the owls species of Turtle Island. The owl is a rich subject, it is one that first came to me in a vision, it was one that beloved colleagues also explored, and the “Howl” collection, of which this piece is a part of, was for an exhibition at Aberdeen Cultural Center, where I spent my youth with artists and writers, and I therefore used the poem by Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”, in which he lists the many crazy, ugly, beautiful people he loved, and the wildness of his generation, to explain the personality that I see in these owls. There is a deep love for humanity and the natural world. There is also a search for understanding spiritual matters; the dark night of the soul, feminine powers, travelling between life and death, the hedge, wisdom, seeing in the dark, the predator, the hunter, the warrior, seeing upside down, and all around. These paintings were for my friends, and many of them have stories about the flowers “Birds of Paradise”, seeing the correlation between. the colours, the subject, and the theme is why I gave it that name.