For the past 10 years I have felt a very strong connection with the Corvid family of birds, which includes Crows and Ravens. These Brilliant, intelligent birds not only have family structures and can be taught to speak the human language (just like parrots), but are the only birds who have been documented using a form of tool (sticks) to get food.  Many cultures have held a fascination for Crow’s and Raven’s over the centuries. So much so, that there is a huge base of mythology in almost every culture across the world.

I am not to be excluded from this fascination. To me, these birds symbolize wisdom and transformation. Out with the old and in with the new. These Crows and Raven’s are about evolution of the self, society, and consciousness. We are always in flux and evolving in some small, or big, way and if not, we are stagnant. The Crow and Ravens are catalysts for change. They symbolize making room for bigger better things to come into your life. Without some endings there can be no beginnings and all of our lives are in flux of beginnings and endings.

As with most of my work, this series embraces duality and has two prime directives: the concepts of being grounded and of flight - how we ebb and flow between these two states throughout life. The grounded birds are stable with their environment built up around them symbolized with the thicker application of paint. Thoughts, feelings, poems and situations are scraped into the paint and written over top of each other to invoke the complexity of our inner selves and the environments we exist in. The birds in flight represent change. Breaking out of the thickness of our worlds and flying through thin veils of transformation. On a journey, they have created space to embrace other environments and soon will become grounded and nest once again. I think of this as being a cyclical process that never stops in our life. Our purpose is to find balance between these states of being.

In 2005, one of my Crow ad Raven series, was a finalist in the animal art category of the 22^nd annual Artist’s Magazine Art competition. Red Raven was selected and my name was featured in the December issue of the Artist’s Magazine. Since then, the crow series is still going strong with more and more new images being created every year with a progression of color, texture and deep thoughts.

For me it’s about jumping… and growing wings on the way down. Trusting that everything is an evolution and what is meant to happen is all of our own creation and decision making.