Crows are my favorite birds. I love birds in general but I love crows the best. This is a monotype by David Kroll who I blogged about a few days ago. I really like what he writes about birds in his artist statement: "birds represent messengers from the wild. They embody beauty and fragility. They are visitors that remind us of lands beyond, wilderness." When I think of crows I think of them as Mr. Kroll describes but I also think that they are birds of the urban world too. Confident, chatty, self possessed, curious and tough, they seem to live well in spite of us and our cities and suburbs. I love the absence of decoration on them and the fact that their utter blackness forces you to see them as a graphic expression of bird. Purely, simply bird.
When I was a young girl, we had a book called An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton, the man who hosts the show Inside the Actor's Studio. It is a wonderful cataloguing of real and imagined terms for groupings of animals. And the one that always stood out for me was the real term describing a group of crows. A murder of crows. It's kind of shocking really. But in a strange way it fits. Urban birds that shouldn't be messed with.
The monotype image from David Kroll is at once both beautiful and disturbing. From a website on Folklore and Superstition, http://www.shades-of-night.com/aviary/folklore.html and from a very reliable source, a close friend we share, who learned it from her mother, you know that one crow is not good Birdie. If I can make a request, it would be that you would double up this image so that there are two crows, which we both have learned is much better for all concerned! Until then, I may not visit your blog until the image is archived. Your sweaty-palmed friend, Kalliope.
Posted by: kalliope | March 22, 2006 at 08:57 PM