Evening by June Underwood
We can banter about crows all we like, but if a subject has weight for us, then likely it has been touched on in our art. What have we said in that way? I decided to have a look at A&P contributor web sites, broadening the subject a bit from just crows to birds. I present to you the interesting variety I found. What do these works have to say to each other?
Disclaimer: I may well have missed other, very appropriate work: please add anything you wish. Unfortunately, I’ll be gone most of the day, but I can edit the post to incorporate any suggestions when I return.
by Angela Ferreira
Blue Angel by Bob Martin
Burdened by David Palmer
Rooks by Rex Crockett
by Steve Durbin
winter evening
a great horned owl watches
the watching stranger
The birds in the pictures are talking to me rather than among themselves. The crows in the first picture are lovely, the bird in the second picture is scary, the angel is peaceful and the rooks are dramatic. I would love to see a living horned owl.
Now…lately I been hearing about my work being scary a lot… maybe the birds and the crows inside my mind are chirping too loud!
Angela,
I don’t find this picture scary. With respect to your picture here, I meant ‘challenging’ compared to Bob’s soothing angel.
A while back, I said that your picture reminds me of rare dreams that I have. The dreams are significant to me and are characterized by dim light. They have profound meaning which makes them a little scary. Thus, scary is not ‘bad’.
If not exactly scary, I definitely find Angela’s picture dark and mysterious. I think it’s one of her strongest works. I also love the color scheme.
Speaking of color, all of these have something blue about them, except for Rex’s highly simplified rooks, which I imagine ina pale blue-gray sky. It may not be obvious in my photo, but I gave it a slight blue cast to represent the chill winter evening on which it was taken.
Birds and flight seem to be very deep and powerful theme in our psychic makeup. I think it has elements of both longing and fear.
Big oops — I was in such a rush to take off yesterday, I left David Palmer’s crow/raven out of the post. And he’s the one who started the whole crow thing a couple days ago. It is an older painting (19
7797); his current work is more about a bird’s-eye view of things. But it’s important not least because it completely spoils my previous comment about blue.Here is my little contribution.
http://dearts.net/Waterfall.htm
DP’s experience in Big Sur (with birds) seems similar.
Steve,
I wondered why you chose the particular piece of mine — but now I see — it’s the blue. I want to change it out for a better one, but I’ll let it sit as a lesson for all of us about old work on our website.
Angela,
The combination of the luminous and the multiplicity of figures in your piece is magical — scary but powerful. I keep going back to it to read it more, to suss it out. Which I can’t do, but that only makes me look even further.
Rex, the sense of flight is delicious. And Bob, yours makes me sad. Steve, I woke up yesterday morning with an after-dream of an owl. I put it into a painting, but in the process of doing the work, it disappeared. But it was very like your owl — watching, just watching, a pool of shadow backed by light.
The one picture here that really sends me shuddering is David Palmer’s — while I have always seen the corvids as irreverent and humorous, I would be terrified if one planted its claws into my neck. The shadow of the beak across the head is particularly chilling.
By the way, for $5US, you can become a lifetime member of the American Society of Crows and Ravens. Your money entitles you to nothing but a good talking line on your resume. Or at least that was the case when I joined, some time back. I don’t even know if they are still operating a website — it was one of the early send-us-your-money schemes. So charming that I did so.
D.,
I just clicked on your url — it’s a marvelous multiplicity of materials encapsulated in a tiny bit of a movie. I first thought I was looking at a painting, and then when the action started, I thought you had either superimposed the action or cut a hole in the painting (that widened my eyes a bit). And then I finally got my bearings.
The text vignette that accompanies it is perfectly matched — the water that flows on, marking time, the same but different: very much “you can’t step into the same river twice” — and yet it feels like it might be the same — and in fact, I looked at the movie 4 or 5 times, reveling in its brevity and encapsulation. Also the fact that it was a little one who discovered (discovers) the perfect miniature is part of the micro-vision of the work itself.
Thank you.
The wings of the blue angel are heavenly,very cloudlike.
The David Palmer raven is powerfully dramatic. It is really good.
The great horned owl is gentle, kind, realistic and precious.
Thanks, Bob, David and Steve
June,
I’d be happy to switch the crow image if you wish. I chose it not for the blue, which I noticed later, but just because I like it. But you have a lot of nice crows in that section of your web site. Let me know what you’d like to replace with. You can also add an image to a comment. Sometimes our spam-catcher doesn’t like that, but let me know and I can unspam it.
Carolyn,
Thanks for your comments. I especially like the insight that the angel’s wings are like clouds — I hadn’t thought of that. I wonder if Bob had that explicitly in mind while painting it, or it just came out in accordance with artistic intuition.
D.,
I love the video and the abstraction from focusing in on the tiny waterfall.
I also like what I think you mean by the connection: that this is something seen by the side, not the “main goal” of whatever activity was underway. That would open up a lot more for this gallery/collection, which I assembled based on just the simple-minded crow/bird theme. But now I’m wondering if that was in fact so accidental for David, considering the importance of crows for him, at least in the past.
Self-Portrait with Raven
the solitude of ravens by Masahisa Fukase
Birgit,
It’s quite clear that I was looking at Fukase’s work in 1998 when I cut the stencils for those crows. I didn’t know that I did that, but there it is.
It is an older painting (1977);
1997. (both of these raven paintings). But that’s still a pretty long time ago :)
D..,
I enjoyed your video and the story of Lucas’ waterfall.
Steve, June, and Birgit,
Thanks.
David,
Let’s have the Exhibition at the Storage Facility.
We can place large reproductions (8-10 ft.) of the Crow Images on the outside of the building (Itself as Product Placement!). Maybe we can follow-up with on-going exhibitions of other people’s Stuff.
D, good thinking. Maybe we could also make little crow-size t-shirts with the Storage Facility logo and sell them to local birds. Special deals if the whole flock buys.
I think I need to keep a little note book while I am painting. I can never remember what was going on in my head. I do remember that I started out with the thought of painting a women with wings and I did not know what wings looked like, but I went at it anyway. The blue is referring to the background, which is a very vivid deep blue, that gets lost in the photo. I didn’t think of clouds but I can see them now in the painting. This angel is not sad, but It’s OK if he is.