Artist Statement:

I began the Crow series while living in the south of India earlier this year. My studio was outdoors, on the back porch of an old stone house. We were on a mountaintop, 7,000 feet up, at the edge of a steep escarpment. On clear mornings I could see for miles and miles; by mid-afternoon we were usually in the clouds. The crows would swoop down from the woods behind me and soar out over the valley below. I loved watching them from this vantage point.

I began these pieces with an underpainting of textured gesso and acrylic medium. Once that was dry (which could take days on a misty mountaintop in monsoon season) I worked the paint into the surface, adding and removing layers of colour to create subtle variations and depth. The crows are cut out of a separate sheet of paper, textured and painted in the same palette of colours, and then overlaid onto the painted background.