Crows: Gay Schempp
Caw
The smarty pants of the avian kind, corvids look at you fearlessly, then croak in derision. Gay Schempp invited a murder of crows to her backyard for pandemic feasting. While they cracked corn, she observed and sketched, capturing extravagant gestures and eloquent poses. Her wonderful Quarantine 2020: Through a Crow’s Eye book interprets the shut-down experience with cartoons of crows donning nitrile gloves, wrapping face masks around beaks and hoarding toilet paper.
Schempp’s work on view at the Five Points Gallery in Torrington, CT, participates in the long-standing tradition of Aesopian animals that wryly comment on the human condition. But these crows seem so far above the level of humans that I am tempted to coin an antonym for anthropomorphize – call it faunamorphize. Perched on a superior rung of the ladder of evolution, the corvid mocks our human folly. Schempp has captured this skeptical point of view in her Quarantine drawings.
In one, a withered claw is titled “My Hands after 572 Washes.” Another cartoon features a crow raising an eyebrow at a bottle of Lysol as he asks “Would you drink this?”
The Crossing Guard
Crows love to collect shiny items, so Schempp has ample occasion to feature her favorite birds with various cultural symbols. Bits of flag appear, along with the cleaning paraphernalia of the shutdown. In “Warning Call” the silhouette of an alert dog is sandwiched between flag and alarmed bird beak. Schempp says the crows became so accustomed to their dominion in the backyard that they would hiss at her large dog, chasing him off. Another vignette features the dawning of consciousness as a crow catches his reflection in shining waters.
Two Old Crows
“Two Old Crows “seems to project the weary bonding of a long marriage: together, but a bit cantankerous. Schempp works with encaustic, a wax technique which gives her surfaces a lush dimensional feel. Her crow feathers come out simultaneously fluffy and iridescent. Her models appear to have been very cooperative and Schempp renders their jaunty poses with a confident hand.
Reflections
The last couple years offer us ample testimony on the impact of the shut-downs and isolation of the pandemic era. By restricting activity and sociability these government policies seem in at least some cases to have produced a historically specific mini-genre of social commentary. Artists like Schempp have made lemonade of these lemons, closely parsing the environment for significant detail that can be turned into art, metaphor and cultural critique.
Warning Call and Gay Schempp