Roadkill Sketches
All drawings are 5.25 x 8 inches, pen & ink or mixed media (ink, watercolor, pencil, acrylic).
Years back I read an essay by Barry Lopez about roadkill. He described his ritual of stopping for animals dead on the road and removing them, gently and with great care. To each dead creature he encountered, Lopez offered a few words of apology, something akin to a prayer.
That essay made me aware I was involved in a similar ritual of my own, one I continue to this day. I draw or sometimes paint an animal I find lying dead below a plate-glass window or bloodied on the road. It is a small effort to give some kind of meaning to the life lost. Sometimes I make a full study—an opportunity to examine, say, a screech owl or milk snake up close. Other times my sketch is simple, direct, reflecting the burden of senseless carnage. 
