corvidae corvus Painting

large format painting, acrylic, oil and ink on four wooden panels. last summer the farmer next to us dumped a bin liner on my porch with a note which read 'these are for you'. when i looked inside I found at least twelve culled crows. due to the proliferation of these birds, the local agricultural admin had given the farmers permission to cull a certain percentage of the creatures. i am very fond of crows and their relatives, magpies and jackdaws - intelligent and impertinent birds - and had asked my neighbor for a specimen, but twelve... for this painting i chose three and the rest i buried under the rhododendron bush. my scientific education has taught me to examine things, and the best way of doing so, is to draw or paint the thing you want to examine. my artistic education has taught me to see things that maybe not everybody sees. therefore, the title for this piece is the scientific latin name for crow, 'corvidae corvus', but the artistic work reveals a lot more color than is, perhaps, immediately evident... this painting is also very tied up with the 8th elegy by rainer maria rilke.