The 10 Second Crow project

Crows are my favourite animals, so frankly they deserve their own page.

In 2022, I started a year long project, the 10 Second Crows, in which I gave myself just 10 seconds each day to paint a Crow on a 6 x 5 inch piece of paper.

Each artwork was dated, thus creating 365 original, unique Crows from January 1 to December 31.

Watch the video below to see how I made them.

If you’d like to buy one, please click here.

Prints of the entire year and individual months are also available.

We like to think we know the Crow; big noisy black birds who, like ourselves, are busy going about their complex lives, inhabiting countryside and city. Ubiquitous, mysterious, constant, invisible - at once familiar and enigmatic.

The Crow has sturdily woven its way into human life for centuries, with cultures worldwide both revering and demonising them seemingly in equal measure. In some places they are killed out of fear, in others they are worshipped. These are creatures which have left their mark.

Twenty years ago I came across the book of poems From The Life & Songs of The Crow by Ted Hughes. I was immediately intrigued, confused and transfixed. The poems follow the stories of man, woman, Adam, Eve, God and various creatures as they try to interact with and understand Crow, a character wrapped in apocalyptic uncertainty, a puppeteer, a student trying to understand himself; both creator and destroyer.

Hughes, who published Crow in 1970, considered the work to be his life’s masterpiece. With themes of grief, trauma, loss, disorder, rebirth and ecstasy, Crow is a loose retelling of the Book of Genesis with extra nihilism thrown in for good measure.

The 10 Second Crows you see here are a small part of a long journey I have been on since reading Hughes’ book. The paintings were all made with the time limit of 10 seconds, one for each day of 2022. Since the pandemic and various lockdowns, dates have become perhaps more significant to us, with missed and forcibly rescheduled life events putting us all on hold. As we struggled to remember if that thing happened last year... (or was it the year before...?) we were left in a state which for some was sad, others a joy, but for all of us significant on a global scale.

Like the wild Crows themselves, these paintings have a fleeting quality, movement and personality captured in the brevity of the mark making. And much like the birds, their detail is simplified, swallowed by the shadowy void of their shapes; silhouettes against the world. However, in this plainness is hiding an abundance of beauty and intelligence which could be easily overlooked, but when considered can reveal whole worlds at once separate yet irrevocably intertwined with our own.