Your Birds Were My Favorite Flowers by Maya Patagnan

Acrylic 2024

This piece emerges from a journal entry I kept writing during the pandemic, centered on a quiet situationship with someone who loved birds but never shared that part of himself openly to other people. His favorite, the mirlo, became for me what flowers are in romance—an unspoken offering, delicate and intimate, as though he were giving me blossoms without realizing it. In the work, I use blue and orange to create a stark contrast—orange embodying myself, and dark blues radiating from the birds. The opposition of colors mirrors the distance and dissonance between us, as well as the tension of carrying unrequited feelings. The girl in the piece, surrounded by birds, symbolizes my inner state: even when I close my eyes and try to escape, the presence of the birds—and by extension, of him—remains inescapable. They hover, beautiful yet suffocating, embodying both tenderness and entrapment. The mirlo, then, becomes both flower and cage, desire and burden, illustrating how intimacy can bloom while also enclosing the self.