Crow'by Richard Wieth places a single dark bird at the center of an 11x14 inch canvas. The head sits high in the picture and turns to the left, with a pale, yellow-gray beak pointing toward the edge. The body leans in a long diagonal from the head down to the lower left, where the tail sweeps toward the corner and nearly meets the edge. Thin legs reach down to a slender branch near the bottom, and more branch lines drift across the background. This original crow oil painting gives the bird nearly the whole frame.
 
The bird is built from blue-black, deep violet and ink blue rather than flat black. Cobalt and ultramarine show across the back and tail, small touches of gray-white appear near the chest, and one warm pink-orange mark sits low on the body. Behind it the palette moves to soft sage, pale yellow-green and gray-blue, with traces of lavender and dusty rose near the edges. The dark bird against the pale ground makes the strongest contrast in the painting, while the repeated blues tie the figure back into its surroundings.
 
Richard Wieth models the form with light, loosely placed strokes instead of outlines. The sheen of the feathers comes from patches of lighter blue and gray set beside the darkest passages, so the body seems to turn in space. The head is the darkest and most compact mass. At the chest and back the edges soften into the surrounding color, which keeps the bird from looking cut out of the canvas. A few small highlights near the head and beak add focus without adding detail.
 
The background is worked in thick, dragged and scraped layers of paint. Pale ridges catch the light across the upper half, and the weave of the canvas shows through in places, giving the surface a rough, tactile quality. Short dry strokes and broken color fill the open space, while thin dark lines suggest twigs. Where the branch crosses on the right, the marks thicken and break into short, quick touches. The texture rewards close looking and changes as the light moves across the surface.
The eye lands first on the head and beak, where the contrast is strongest, then follows the diagonal of the back down to the tail. The branch on the right balances the tail on the lower left, and the open pale space at upper left gives the head room to turn. Values stay in a tight band, dark for the bird and mid-light for the ground, so the image reads clearly from across a room.
 
 It measures 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm), oil on canvas, and it is sold unframed. At this size it suits a desk wall, a shelf, an entry, a study or a small gallery wall in a home, cabin, office or shop.
Because the painting is unframed, it will need to be framed. A thin dark walnut or black float-style frame would echo the blue-black of the bird, while a plain light wood frame would pick up the sage and pale yellow tones of the background.