Whitney Robbins: Ravens

I became an avid bird watcher about six years ago, just like my dad and my grandmother. Little did I know that this interest was in my genes and that it was latent until my thirties! My original fascination was with all black birds. Being a native of Massachusetts, that means crows, blackbirds, grackles and starlings. I love the striking negative and positive shapes that these birds create against the sky or snow. In 2000, I began drawing, painting, sculpting, and trying to photograph these bird forms. The sculptures shown here are made of paper mache, and the shape shifting forms are oil on small canvases.

Last year (the 2004-2005 academic year) when I was on sabbatical, I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for six months. My old fascination with black birds came back to me in full force as I was living amongst many ravens and watching them daily. The raven is not only beautiful and strong, it is also a smart and playful character symbolizing for me the space and freedom I experienced while living in the Southwest. After seeing the film How to Draw a Bunny, about the artist Ray Johnson, I was inspired to create a series of collages that were made up of all my own images. I began creating block prints, oil transfers, ink drawings and photographs that I could combine in poster sized pieces. The only part of my collages that I did not create is the Chinese writing (the characters were written by my partner, Marjorie, when she was practicing her basic Mandarin in preparation for our trip to China).

I liked how the Chinese looked with the black and white bird images and free-form ink drawings. In most works the characters are decorative not literal. I was inspired to try using blue ink after looking at a lot of works on paper by Pierre Alechinsky. This more recent raven series ranges in size. The squawking ravens and solo ravens are smaller, 5"x 7" or so, the tighter framed multiple ravens with left foot are 10"x 12" and the others with Chinese characters are 20"x 26". If you look at my recent work you will see that I continue to explore the raven shape but it has become more abstracted.