"An Unkindness,” is the term used to reference a flock of ravens, the drawing impresses upon the viewer a sense of foreboding and threat. The ominous, swirling unkindness in the middle panel of the triptych and the pack of wolves, jaws wide in preparation for attack, in the adjacent, confer a theme that has become central to O’Neil’s oeuvre: life on Earth is arduous and fraught with challenge. A reprieve is found in the heavenly scene of the right panel of the triptych. Reminiscent of the pastel Impressionist paintings of Claude Monet and Georges Seurat, the ethereal landscape is a paradoxical bookend, one that offers hope and optimism, to austere darkness.

"Traveling to Spain and Portugal this summer and seeing every Goya I’ve ever wanted to see also influenced this work. I also saw the painting that basically started my career….Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Seeing his work in person prompted me to tackle multi-panelled work again, and to do so in a daring and unexpected way. I also saw Picasso’s Guernica and frankly thought I could make a large drawing that rivaled it. I don’t know that I quite beat him with this one, but I think I’m about 3 big drawings away from making a piece that might take Guernica down. Our themes aren’t that different. Our subject matter basically the same. But I have no shame in saying that I saw Guernica, was impressed, but also knew it wasn’t the end-all-be-all that I’ve always been taught and told it is. Before I die, I will make a drawing better than that painting." -- Robyn O'Neil


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First printed in 1486, The Book of Saint Albans was a collection of advice and information on hawking, hunting, and heraldry. Among its pages lies a celebrated catalogue of “terms of venery,” those poetic collective nouns given groups of wild animals: a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, a murder of crows, and an unkindness of ravens. The latter two, dark in both feather and meaning, have long been thought to draw their somber tone from humankind’s association of these birds with death, decay, and the uncanny. Looking beyond their sensational and ominous reputation, ravens are among the most intelligent of birds; capable of problem-solving, tool use, and even a kind of playful mischief that rivals that of primates.

The raven, in particular, has lingered in the human imagination as an omen and a symbol of sorrow. Nowhere is this more hauntingly realized than in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, where the bird becomes the embodiment of grief itself. As the narrator mourns his lost Lenore, the raven’s shadow deepens his despair, its every utterance a reminder of the permanence of loss.

In 2019, artist Robyn O’Neil revisited this longstanding fascination with the raven in her fourth exhibition with the Susan Inglett Gallery. Appropriately titled An Unkindness, the exhibition extended the symbolic lineage of the bird into the present day. O’Neil’s work in this series signals a notable evolution in her practice: a deconstruction of the visual and material, and a reimagining of her aesthetic process as one rooted in entropy, transformation, and renewal.

At the center of the exhibition stands the triptych An Unkindness, whose central panel depicts a turbulent, swirling mass of ravens, while adjacent panels feature a pack of wolves, jaws bared in anticipation of attack. Together, these images articulate one of O’Neil’s central concerns—the fragile and arduous nature of our existence. Complementary works such as A Lot of Things Contributed and The Nemesis Hypothesis reinforce this theme through their fragmented and monochromatic construction, embodying a world at once disordered and deeply expressive. Yet the rightmost panel of the triptych offers a striking counterpoint: a luminous, pastel-hued landscape reminiscent of Monet or Seurat. This ethereal scene suggests a tenuous optimism, a gesture toward transcendence amid darkness.

Underlying An Unkindness is a meditation on the relationship between destruction and creation. Known for her meticulous graphite drawings, O’Neil here embraces a more visceral process; pouring boiling water onto paper, scraping with sandpaper, and incising with razor blades. These acts of material degradation produce a new formal tension, as the works oscillate between precision and chaos. For O’Neil the raven is an emblem not only of darkness, but of intelligence and adaptability, a creature known to thrive through cunning and invention even in the harshest environments. In this sense, O’Neil’s An Unkindness not only engages with the symbolic history of the raven (from medieval superstition to Poe’s gothic melancholy) but recontextualizes it as a contemporary allegory of resilience, transformation, and the cyclical nature of creation itself.