This began life as a painting of a doll dressed in some sort of national costume. It was a useful bit of practice at faces and detail but not a keeper. This is the start of the eradication process and shows the elements of a big sky and some landscape detail in the bottom third.

I worked on it intermittently while making the painting of the yellow crane and forgot to take photos. There was nothing particularly edifying, luckily, although I do like to document process, especially when a transformation happens without warning. In this case, having messed about with both the land area and the sky, scraping a lot of paint off along the way, I made the decision to start again with the sky by washing it down as far as possible, and coating it with a featureless layer of white paint. I had been looking at my photos and videos of birds with a view to placing one large beaked head along the side, as happens with some of my wildlife videos – nothing, nothing, nothing, MASSIVE EYEBALL.

Then I came back to the drone of the previous piece because there is something both exciting and disturbing about these remotely controlled ‘eyes in the sky’. Their ambiguity is interesting and I thought it would add another dimension to an otherwise mundane landscape.

At the same time, the increasing evidence of intellectual capability in corvids makes their presence in the sky a less uni-dimensional experience. Crows evidently remember who has been unpleasant to them (Creagh, 2011) and having been pursued round the garden by a crow that had been hand-reared and was now newly released and looking for someone to feed it* I was keen to get it off my shoulder in the least frantic way possible. They remember faces and they make tools so I’d say it’s not a stretch to imagine them engineering a bird-led uprising.

The tiny blips are raised pieces of solid paint from the previous painting, which I’m repurposing as crows.

There’s a little more emphasis in this version but I’m proceeding carefully. The scratchmark drone in the top left quadrant did not last but a hint of it will appear in due course.

3rd December. This suddenly has a new story. Crows mob birds of prey frequently, and I’m wondering what, theoretically, they would do with a drone once these became frequent occupiers of the same space. This one has quite a hostile look to it and it seems to have brought its own vortex! I think the crows are going to dismantle it.

This is the latest but not the last. I’m feeling driven to reinstate the smooth sky and add in the birds and the drone as hints of themselves.

Creagh, S. The Conversation, 2011. https://theconversation.com/never-cross-a-crow-it-will-remember-your-face-2121

*I discovered this later in the day after it had abandoned me as a lost cause and gone to bother my neighbours, one at a time, up the lane.