Crow Article

This is an article I wrote for last year's Vancouver Eastside Culture Crawl, which focused on the crow as a growing muse for artists:

Arleigh Wood is beautiful, like a crow. As she sits in her studio, a small space on Vancouver’s Eastside that has a definitive New York loft feel to it with its wooden elevators and industrial location, one can’t help but be distracted by her dark hair, olive skin and soft demeanor.

Much of her work centers on crows, so one could draw the assumption that both the artist and her work are ominous, but the opposite is true. There is a lightness and an openness to both Arleigh and her paintings resulting in a natural and enthralling loveliness to the woman and her work.

“They’re quite revered animals in most cultures. I think that people here are maybe afraid of them because they are…just very powerful symbols. They evoke such a response in people, either very positive or very negative.”

Wood and a dozen or so artists at the annual Eastside Culture Crawl consider crows to be a muse in their work. Often met with condemnation when mistaken for the Raven in First Nations Myth, a nuisance to construction sites, and constant dumpster decoration, the crow is now taking its rightful place as a symbol of local spirit.

The crow-rich Eastside Culture Crawl, an art exhibition that runs this year from November 20-22, showcases the work of various eastside artists between Main St. First Avenue, Commercial Drive and the waterfront.

Each year, organizers design the entire press package around crows, from crows on ceramics, to three-dimensional crows on jester sticks.

Richard Tetrault, a longtime artist in Strathcona and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, said they’ve far from exhausted the usefulness of the crow in art. He has been intrigued by these ornithological opportunists for the past 25 years.

“They’re consummate urban adapters…much of my work centers on the downtown eastside…human survivors and human energy and spirit…crows in a way have become analogous in a sense because they’re adapters and they’re survivors.”

It’s the duality of their nature, much like our own, that fascinates Tetrault.

“What’s intriguing to me about crows…is that you can…love them and then they do something totally wicked or gross or aggressive…they have that dark and light aspect.”

These human qualities are what make the crow a much more captivating subject than other birds in the city.

“We see certain human characteristics reflected in crows and that attracts us to them…because we’ve got some terms of reference…and whereas maybe with birds and other animals, we don’t have that same element of empathy.”

Not everyone sees what Tetrault sees.

In fact, there’s a strong collective belief that crows are a nuisance to our city, as Dr. Wayne Goodey, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at UBC, indicates.

“A lot of people seem to have the idea that crows exist mainly to annoy us”, he says. “That somehow our activities have attracted them and therefore they’re here causing us all these problems. It’s really quite the reverse…they’re taking advantage of the opportunities that we have provided…so it’s a bit arrogant for us to complain that they’re a problem when we basically created the situation in which they could cause us difficulty.”

Perhaps, like other often-judged urban citizens, all they need to gain a little respect is some plain old understanding.

According to Crowbusters.com, the American Ornithological Union recognizes four species of Crow in North America, Vancouver being home to the North Western Crow. Extremely social animals, they live in family groups of between two to fifteen birds and they work together as a unit. They are one of only a few species of birds that exhibits “cooperative breeding behavior”, meaning they help feed the incubating female, watch over their family members, feed the nestlings and defend against predators.

As a whole, they operate from central positions called “roosts” where they gather every night just before dark and, though it is not entirely known why they meet in such a large cluster, sometimes in the thousands, it is thought by researchers to be a part of their complex social system.

Their high intelligence level is starting to gain the attention of researchers as well, as in the case of Betty, a Caledonian Crow studied by Oxford University’s Behavioral Ecology Research Group. Without having seen it done before, Betty fashioned a hook out of a piece of wire in order to retrieve a bucket of food from a long tubular container.

American communications consultant Joshua Klein has studied crows in his spare time for ten years, and shows the remarkable Betty Video as part of a lecture on crows on the website www.ted.com. Crows can “very quickly and very flexibly adapt to new challenges and new resources in their environment, which is really useful if you live in a city,” Mr. Klein says in his discussion.

This intelligence and adaptability will continue to inspire artists to interpret them in a human way, if not because they are always there, ready and willing to inspire.

“There are so many on the Eastside that you’re kind of watching them all the time,” Arleigh Wood reminisces. “They’re like your little neighbors.”

-Alisen Down.