As a lover of birds, I am as easily enthralled by colorful or beautifully patterned plumage as anyone. But more often than not, it is not the looks (flashy or otherwise) of an animal subject that intrigue me enough to capture it on canvas, but its personality. Ravens are among the most characterful of common birds that one is likely to encounter. Even watching them casually for a short time, one notices their cleverness, their curiosity, and their strong familial bonds. Studies have proven conclusively that Ravens recognize individual human faces, and they can even teach those facial characteristic to their young who have not observed the persons themselves first hand.

Given their black plumage and their role as highly adaptable scavengers, it’s easy to see why ravens have accreted so much negative human myth over time. To many ancient European cultures, they were seen as bringers of death and pestilence. The Greeks believed that they ferried the souls of the dead to the Underworld. Others considered them supernatural omens of bad luck and even as familiars to witches. Across the ocean, Native Americans looked on their Corvid brothers with kinder eyes. In much Native American mythology and folklore, the Raven is a trickster: cunning, playful, and mischievous. The Raven is even the central player in a popular cosmological story; it is the raven’s bungled theft of sunlight from an old miser that subsequently creates the sun, moon, and stars. Legends, myths, and symbolic figures associated with ravens vary widely from region to region, and tribe to tribe, but there is no question that early Americans saw a reflection of themselves in these common and highly successful birds.

In this study, based on a raven I observed in Jackson Hole Wyoming in 2024, I enjoyed exploring the twinkle in the bird’s eye, and his gorgeous, iridescent black plumage, as well as the relationship between those colors and textures and the spontaneous abstract background. This study is part of a series that is painted more loosely and directly than most of my work. The mixed media application harkens back to Covid, when I created well over one hundred small studies of birds and animals combining graphite, watercolor, acrylic, and colored pencil. This piece is a much larger, and certainly more developed, example of that style.