A college of mine approached me asking to make a picture featuring the famous blue bird of happiness.

I was happy to accept the request thinking that everyone would be glad to see this bird. Searching for the background I came quickly across a Tibetan tale commencing with the following words: “Once upon a time a part of Tibet was very poor. There was neither river, good soil, flowers nor green grass in this part of the country. And moreover, this part was also cold to live in. People starved, felt cold and did not know what did happiness mean. They even so thought somewhere in the world one can find happiness. The elderly supposed that happiness is a very nice bird and lives far away in the East in the mountains covered by snow. Where the bird flies happiness flies together with her.” I tried to feature this phenomenon of longing for happiness stretching out our hands with the hope that we catch it although happiness lives in us in our heart.

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In the course of my search, I found out that the origin of the idea of the blue bird was the halcyon. The halcyon was featured many times on stamps, I found more than 1500 stamps of this topic in the world catalogue.

To paint the bird, I used Hungarian stamps from the ceramics of Margit Kovacs series.