Majority Rules

Nassau artist Melissa Maura posted this photo on social — four pelicans stacked in a narrow column, overlapping, half in the water — and I asked if I could paint it. She said yes. She’d already done the hard part: the composition was all there, a deliberate ordering of bodies inside a tight space, nothing like a snapshot.

What I got to play with was the light. Heads and upper bodies catch it; the lower birds slip into deeper blues and greens. That uneven light sets up a hierarchy without naming a boss. Nothing announces authority, but the structure is there.

These pelicans aren’t sentimental. They don’t interact. They don’t perform. Each one is self-contained and watchful. They’re close, but not together — and that little gap is where the tension lives.

The title hints at a condition more than a story: a subtle imbalance in the group, a quiet skew in the numbers, a tilt you feel more than see.

Thanks, Melissa.