Raven on Mars: On Walkabout
14”x11” oil on canvas
$370
Ravens on Mars is a series of five oil on canvas paintings that combines an important part of my pre-art life with where I am now.
In grad school, I investigated how water on early Mars formed the now-dried-up networks of river valleys that we can see on the Martian surface today. Now I sometimes paint marscapes and other spacescapes to connect my past and present.
The marscape part of these paintings, which is based on the combined enhanced-color images taken of Hinners Point above Marathon Valley by the Opportunity Rover in 2015 as it looked for evidence of water in Mars’ past, were painted a few years ago and then set aside when I followed other creative projects. Initially I set these paintings up with a variety of canvas sizes and put them at a tilt as a nod to the process scientists go through to combine the raw images taken by the spacecraft. But then the realities of hanging the paintings at an angle, and the desire to let these paintings each potentially stand alone, caused me to turn them upright for this next phase, at the expense of accuracy to the Martian surface. I also ignored any accuracy in the scale of the birds relative to the Martian terrain. I suspect the birds are about twice as big as they should be, but that is just a guess.
The birds are based on a funny raven I saw while vacationing out west in October 2024. Painting the ravens onto a Martian landscape, to me, feels symbolic of my own adventures to faraway lands: intellectual, imaginative, and physical.
