Illustration for the poem 'Two Crow' by Alexander Pushkin 1910

This black and white illustration was made by Ivan Bilibin in 1910 for Alexander Pushkin’s poem ‘Two Crows’. Look at how Bilibin uses line; it’s so precise! Each line feels deliberate, building up the texture of feathers and clouds. The contrast is stark, like a woodcut, but with a softness, you know? It’s in the way he shades the crows' wings, dense areas of tiny lines giving way to open spaces. I'm drawn to the crow on the right, its beak slightly open, as if it’s about to caw, or maybe it’s just commenting on the weather. The way the feathers are rendered reminds me of the graphic quality in the work of someone like Rockwell Kent. It’s a kind of illustrative style that embraces its own artifice, and yet it still manages to evoke a sense of mood, and mystery. It shows that art can be both representational and decorative. There’s an ongoing conversation, isn’t there, between what we see and how we choose to depict it.