The Raven

 ”The Raven,” everyone is familiar with the poem by Edgar Allan Poe, and made an irresistible title for this painting. It’s too obvious to ignore, but the Raven was an afterthought. I had started this about three or four years earlier, and it was started as a view from the window of an apartment I had in Mount Vernon, New York, and it had those trees and the red roofs out there, and I don’t have that place anymore, but I enjoyed painting there.

It gave me some other subjects in that interior and I’d put a mirror in front of the window and painted one of the small prep studies, which is also in this exhibition. And that was a finished painting in itself and I thought, well, this suggests a larger painting ’cause I just liked the composition so much.

Well, what I ended up with is only vaguely related to the initial painting, but that’s okay with me. I liked that when they take on a life of their own about this painting. I said the raven was an afterthought. It initially had meant to have some various Chinese cloisonnade vases on that tabletop, but I lost interest in those as that it was evolving.

Instead, I put this complicated still life, which has numerous elements of the valley toss. The glass globe in this case is kind of a, a glimpse into the next world, I suppose, and I painted myself without my feet reaching to the ground. I’ve done that a lot, it’s based on the Rembrandt drawing of, there’s a figure in there whose feet don’t reach the ground.

I’m sure the real reason he did is ’cause the models walked away and he didn’t get to finish the feet, but probably was not his original intention. But I, I like it. That’s all I can say about it. The same with the skeletal figure between me and the still alive.

Then later I bought this taxidermy raven, it sat around for years. I didn’t know what I bought it for. Somehow it came together for me that these diagonal lines of the tree and the V-shape of the bird’s wing would make sense together. I painted that left wall a dozen times to get, you know, with shadows of trees to vibrate and continued the movement of the bird’s wing.

It’s a strange painting for me, hardly ever incorporated wildlife. But it could be that this bird flew in the window in the middle of my piece. Again, it’s a taxidermy mount, it holds real still, you can paint it all day long. The only thing I really changed on it was the position of the feet. In fact, if you look closely, you can see that didn’t perfectly cover up the way that the feet were painted before.

But when a bird’s in flight, the the feet are kind of retracted actually, and curled up. Unless they’re just about to touch down and then they spread their fingers out.