Bird Woman 鳥女

The painting presents a profile, with a white, bald forehead and an eye staring to the left with piercing intensity. The other details, including the outlines, are vague. The thin layer of paint has small scratches all over it, and we come to see that the head is a bird's only after looking at the picture for a while.
The bird woman first appeared in the painting of Oyamada, a member of the Surrealist group "Anima" since the mid 1930s, in the early 1940s. With the head of a bird and the body of a woman, a creation using the Surrealist technique of collage, the bird woman was to dominate his paintings over forty years as his most important motif symbolizing a rebellious inner force that has to be both kept alive and tamed. Unlike the bird woman that appears repeatedly in the work of Max Ernst, another Surrealist painter, which dismays us with its erotic seductiveness, Oyamada's version stares into the artist's inner world and, as his alter ego, keeps a watch on the outside society. This painting was first shown in "the 4th Contemporary Japanese Art Exhibition".