Relations...

Portrait (Relation), acrylic on canvas board, painted at the end of 2012, was recently chosen as a finalist in the UArt Open, a regional juried art competition.

Relation was painted as a head study of a crow.  I became interested in crows many years ago, mostly as an antidote to my semi-fear of their raucous and unpredictable behavior.  Then, a couple of years ago, when we moved to the house we're now living in, I found that the crows came around often to the tall trees at the rear of our property, raising cain with their noise and arguing.  I tried to chase them off and it seemed they came to know that I didn't appreciate them and would fly off - especially after I threw small stones at them.  But then something shifted for me.  I didn't like my discomfort, I didn't want to be at the mercy of my feeling of intimidation.  And, they seemed very interesting.  I found out, after a bit of research, that crows, and especially ravens, are highly intelligent animals, capable of remembering human faces.  Well, maybe I felt guilty about my lack of hospitality and fearful that they might remember me and try to get their revenge.  I wanted to get to know them, and understand them.  Crows have a long and venerable history in the myths of human beings, from the first bird to find land after the Great Flood of the Old Testament, to the feisty tricksters of the Native Americans.  To me, crows are both magical and maddening creatures, at once dear relations and the crazy cousins that you disavow knowing.  Crows seem wise and wise-ass.  There's something deep in their shenanigans, something foreboding, as though they know something about the demise of the humans, or at least about personal mortality.  To me the deep and mysterious black of their feathers and sleek bodies contains beautiful iridescent colors not to be seen in most of nature, as though they originated in some otherwordly realm; like shape-shifters or dark magicians, reflecting back to us the maddeningly mundane and deeply mysterious truth about ourselves.