5 December: Crows

In 2018 I made several artworks on the subject of crows. I do love crows, colonies of these beautiful birds inhabit the tall trees around our house. They combine the macabre - Nature's cleaners, carrion eaters - with their dark beauty and excellence as parents. I have seen two crows desperately nurturing a young fledgling fallen from the nest with such tenderness until it was strong and able to fly, defending it from all dangers every day and night. 

I have been revisiting those works, cleaning and clarifying, and making a stylised drawing to use in a pattern. I was hoping to have finished the pattern by today but it is still in tweaking process. The basis for the pattern came from my Birds and Berries pattern I worked in July which was beautiful, but way too subtle for reproduction as a textile, and recently I woke up one morning with the idea to replace the decorative birds I used originally with more edgy crows. I ran with that in the new, clear style and was much happier, a work in progress screenshot shown above.

I am thinking of making prints from these cleaned-up originals, the poetry and inkiness of the crows has an otherworld quality. When my parents died I was convinced their souls were still inhabiting the environs of the house and garden in crow form, looking over me and protecting me, and I still look up to the trees and speak to them.
When I was living amongst the mountains of rural Perthshire a local farmer used to hang dead crows by their feet all around his lambing fields. He told me it was to deter the crows, who would come in the spring and peck the tongues out of the mouths of new-born lambs. The lambs would subsequently die because they couldn't feed. It's a gothic horror story of nature's wild, untamed force associated with crows. It adds to their frighteningly powerful dark side. I suppose lambs' tongues must be some kind of superfood for the crows' young, or perhaps a great delicacy, and I can't help being reminded of King Crimson's 1973 album Larks' Tongues in Aspic which I loved when I was in my mid teens.

I will have an update of the finished pattern very soon, I hope - to go from bees to bottles in total mood contrast, I have to get on with making this years' Christmas cards this coming week!

Thanks for visiting, see you soon!