Still Life Self-Destructing
Carel Brest Van Kempen
30 x 20" Acrylic painting
1991
Common Raven (Corvus corax)
Artist's comment: "Common ravens (Corvus corax) are familiar birds that are found through most of the northern hemisphere. As boys my brother and I had a couple of these intellegent birds as pets, and I remember very well their curiosity and love of play. It was these recollections that inspired my invention of this scenerio, with a raven shredding my studio and destroying that very painting in progress. All of the elements with the exception of the raven actually stood before me as I worked on the piece, though I rearranged them slightly for design's sake.
Carel's blog, writes more:
Three-and-twenty crows dot my back yard. I can hear their gentle caws through my office window. Now and then, I'm startled when one yanks on the rain gutter above me. For a couple of weeks this fall the daily crow count on my property was 57. One day I counted over a hundred. Seems a ridiculous thing to brag about, but the fact is, I had never seen a crow in Salt Lake City until 2001.
Ten years ago, the American Crow (Corvus brachyrynchus) was absent through most of Utah; just three or four populations were isolated in agricultural areas. The current explosion of the species seems to stretch along the metropolitan corridor from Ogden to Provo (about 100 miles). Where these birds came from, I can only guess, but their colonization is not without precedent. Two related pioneers, the Common Raven (C. corax) and the Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia) preceded the crows.
Ravens were always common in the surrounding desert, and as a boy I wondered why they shunned the city itself, but were common urban fixtures in southern California. Twenty-five years ago, the raven invasion started here, about a century after Salt Lake City erupted from the sagebrush desert. It took the birds that long to adapt their behavior to the new landscape. Los Angeles and San Diego are older, and their ravens learned the urban routine first..."
|
|
|
|
|
|
