“The ravens gather to decide the fate of A soul locked away in their spiritual home, the Tower of London behind them. shrouded in hooded cloaks, armed with a scythe, axe, spear and a pitchfork, unaware that they have been infiltrated by an imposter.” 

All corvids have something of the darkness about them, for Ravens that comes from folklore. Ravens are associated with death because they were usually the first birds to arrive on medieval battle fields to scavenge the dead. Even the collective noun for a group of Ravens is dark - an ‘unkindness’. Their association with the Tower of London has many origin stories. Some say it was the Victorians who simply wished to amplify the drama of the execution site, others say it was because of superstition. 

“If the Tower of London ravens are lost or fly away, the Crown will fall and Britain with it.” 

Captive Ravens are still kept at The Tower of London today, tended to every day by the ‘Ravenmaster’. 

Despite their somewhat macabre back story, they are beautiful birds, their feathers are glossy and iredescent in bright light, reflecting deep rainbow hues but what attracted me to them more than anything else was a neat link to my own Celtic/Italian heritage. In Celtic mythology, Ravens are thought to be magical and protective, particularly in battle, the Italian link comes from the Romans - Marcus Valerius took the surname Corvus (Raven, Corvo in Italian) after believing that a lucky Raven helped him to defeat a giant of Gauls; that victory resulted in the Romans being victorious in the battle which ensued thereafter.  Marcus Valerius Corvus handed down the adopted surname through generations to his descendants, who also placed it above their coat of arms. 

So with a neat link to my ancestry and the fact that we have an ‘unkindness’ of Ravens about a mile from the farm that Obi and I walk past regularly, I was always going to make Ravens the subject of one of my paintings. (Obi gives the Ravens a wide birth, he keeps his head down and hurries past them. Maybe he‘s put off by their shrill alarm calls and that low gurgling croak sound they make or maybe he’s worried that they are scheming his own demise). 

So for a while I’d been carrying an image in my head of an unkindness of Ravens, gathered in a murderous huddle but I wanted to add humour and I knew exactly the creature that would be perfect for the role.    

Never has a bird been so aptly nicknamed as the Puffin. ‘Clown Bird’ just epitomises everything about them, from their unmistakable facial markings that look painted on, to the way they comically move and walk. 

My first real-life encounter with a Puffin left me bewildered, I just couldn’t believe that they were real. It was during a trip to Holy Island as a small boy and I’ve been fascinated by them ever since. There’s a colony not far from me at Flamborough, just south of Whitby.   

One of the (many) collective nouns for Puffins further enhances their nickname-  ‘a circus of Puffins’. So deciding which creature was going to be the imposter of the painting took all of 5 seconds, it had to be a Clown Bird. 

In a nod to the nickname, my Puffin has done his best to fit in, hooded and cloaked like his corvid brethren, he is armed not with a weapon (how could a bird whose young are called ‘pufflings’ ever carry a weapon?), he has brought a balloon, albeit a black one in-keeping with the sombre mood of the gathering.

His pose was critical to the humour of the painting, stiff and motionless, trying not to draw attention to himself with his eye focussed knowingly on the viewer.

I’d toyed with putting the birds in an erie Autumnal wood late at night, lit by medieval lanterns but after reading up on the inextricable link between Ravens and the Tower of London, it had to be the latter, which also played into the narrative of the piece that had been spinning around in my head for months.