The Departure

This painting is 36″ x 24″ x 0.5″ on a good quality back-stapled stretched canvas. The sides are painted black.
This painting is based upon the Van Gogh painting titled “A Field of Crows”. I chose to title my reworking of this piece The Departure because this rather ominous piece is one done in the last months of his life, and also because the to me the crows symbolize death a departure that sweeps one away on the black wings of fate. I chose to render this painting in black and white, as I felt that that contributes further to the dark and ominous nature. Also I chose to fracture the image into three, which in a way, framed by black, creates an illusion of being inside a dark space looking out. I incorporated within my painting the poem, A Dream within a Dream, by Edgar Allan Poe. My reasoning for choosing this poem is because it is about a fractured reality, it is also despairing and sad, and it talks about what is real and what is not, it speaks to our perceptions, while also showing the frailty of the human condition and how a man can be desperately clutching reality in his hand only to have it swept away by the raging sea of turmoil.