The Peace of Wild Things

Oil on 2 canvases 38.2 x 47.2in (97 x 120 x 2cm)

A diptych of a Barn owl hunting in the twilight autumnal fields. The painting is named after a Wendell Berry poem with the same title. The notion that it is only humans that experience a sense of existential dread or worry about their future, really struck a chord with me.

The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-Wendell Berry

The picture has been painted using high quality oil paints on two stretched canvases. The two parts of the artwork can be hung closely together (as in the photographs), with a gap between them, or even on separate sides of a doorway depending on the aesthetics of your home's interior. The painting continues around the sides of the canvases and they come with appropriate fixings ready to hang straight onto your wall. Each canvas measures 60 x 97 x 2cm.