Chihuahuan raven, full Buck Moon July 2025

For a decade in the Davis Mountains, we enjoyed the company of a pair of Chihuahuan ravens. The big birds befriended us and would play around, swooping and calling to us until we fed them or at least waved "howdy". They'd recognize us anywhere on the mountain we lived on, and they'd wing down, playfully greeting us with caws and croaks and a special happy noise very much like a throaty purr. They posed for many, many photos. So when a big, low full moon (the Buck Moon, summer's show off July moon) rose in the near-dark sky, something clicked in my convoluted creative mind, and without having planned to, I stepped into the studio and started painting this raven and remembering those many years of golden full moons rising over the mountain.

I don't go off the reservation often, but this painting was a joyous, playful howling-at-the-moon experience, start to finish. The ravens are minimalists and don't hang art in their nest, but I'd like to think they'd appreciate this one. I couldn't make it all designer-stark like most corvid art, I had to be true to myself and make it a seriously detailed nocturnal landscape with a raven in it, but this one was play, at its very best. I needed that.

Hope you smile! The world is too serious for us not to play sometimes.