Eduard Klablena
Parrot
circa 1911-12
The bird’s yellow coat immediately catches the eye. It is so seamless (almost as if the paint is still wet) that it renders the bird quite naked, featherless. By dousing much of it in a thick, heavy layer of one colour, perhaps Klablena intended to draw out the parrot’s pure form and contours rather than its plumaged surface, so as to depict it as anything but a creature of flight; to keep it grounded and simple. The same idea can be applied to its beak and pedestal: both are completely black, with shape being the only characteristic that marks them as being one thing versus another. They are closer to the ground than the rest of the parrot’s body; they are similarly doused in one colour (though black is not a true ‘colour’), but this colour is heavier than yellow and so it appears to visually ‘pool’ at the bird’s base, simultaneously balancing the communication between two opposite hues as well as stabilising the bird’s heavy head by magnetically pulling it towards its sister bay of black - towards a central base. It is only after one registers this clever interaction of the bird’s elements that one can then appreciate the delicate touches of dots and lines found on the bird’s feet and under its eyes. These give the parrot its final definition. They instil in its yellow-and-black parole a note of rhythm, a beat which runs through its stoneware core like a revolving pulse. And it is only now that each of us can imagine the parrot as beginning to nod up and down like a bobble toy, swinging to its own soundless groove.
