Twa Corbies

Edit: Finally updated with a much, much better photo, thank god. Sorry about the seams, I couldn't completely hide them.

Art teacher: Alex, what is that in the bird’s mouth.
Me: Oh that would be an eyeball.
Art teacher: …I was afraid of that.

I really wish my camera didn’t hate oil paint so much – flash renders parts super shiny, no flash makes it look really flat. And since this is a fairly large canvas, the little details get really lost. Anyway. This painting was loosely inspired by one of my favorite songs, the Scottish ballad “The Twa Corbies” – basically a conversation between two ravens over a dead knight they plan to eat. You can find several very different versions on YouTube, all of them beautiful and haunting. It’s kin to the slightly better-known English ballad “The Three Ravens”, but much less romantic, and, I think, the better for it.

Goodness, I love morbid things. I was originally going to make the lady in this rather more corpse-y and decaying, with like her flesh pecked out in places, but I lacked the time to deal with that. Also that might have pushed it over the line into officially inappropriate for the school art show. Not that it won anything anyway!

So. Done spring '10, 24"x48", oil paint. I haven't been able to quite fix the colors, so it has a bit too much of a green tinge, but oh well.