1. I love paintings of quaint farm life, particularly painting of chickens, cows and barns. My husband always complains that the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is nothing but paintings of farms and cows. Imagine my disappointment when it was closed for renovation last year when I visited Amsterdam for the first time. I recently read in ARCHITECT magazine that it's open again with architectural magnificence and I simply can't wait for the opportunity to go.
2. Before Gallery C in Raleigh relocated to a proper downtown location and it was still in the shopping center with Whole Foods, I found a painting by Jean Jack tucked away in the back of the gallery. I was in awe of her approach to capturing Midwestern farms as well as the landscape around them. Landscapes aren't usually my thing, but when it's well done... When I began to look for more of her work I discovered that she has a series of minimalist paintings of "utilitarian structures" that really capture something essential about the subject matter. See for yourself. They are incredible.
3. Painting and drawing animals is difficult. It's hard to capture the pose just right to make the animal look natural and believable. It is figure drawing and painting, but with a less familiar form. Learning the skeleton and muscle mass of any living creature is essential to capture what is recognizable and real about it. It actually requires a bit of research and practice. I started honing this skill with a chicken.
4. When I was but a child....
My mother signed me up for the 4-H club. For those of you who don't know, the 4 H's are head, heart. hands, and health. In my rural South Carolina community it was an after school agricultural club. We learned to bake, craft and make posters about baking and crafting like good little southern girls should. There was a different curriculum for the little boys, but of course I was not privy to it. These monthly club meetings were hosted by the girls' mothers in their warm country homes full of crafts, folk art and other types of quaintness.
At some point in middle school you were no longer eligible for the beginners club, but you could sign up for other skills based programs. My mother, the life long learner, sent me to weekly bread baking classes for a few months. And then she took it too far. She signed me up to raise 2 dozen chickens. My father and I built a brooder house for the 2 day old chickens we brought home and eventually a much larger coop with a 6' tall caged yard. That was where my interest in this project ended. My father raised and cared for the chickens for me, his whiny baby girl. I still had to feed them sometimes and gather the eggs every now and again. I hated every second of it. Then, I had to take the 6 best chickens to the county fair. It was a long boring day spent with 6 ugly chickens. I won exactly nothing that day...except my freedom from 4-H! The redeming part of it all was the friendship I develop with a girl who grew up on a real-life farm and my father. Years later when I was in undergrad he would say to me "You know, you are still a country, even though you don't sound like one." We both knew that wasn't true, but it made him giggle and me roll my eyes and that's how we got on.
Fast forward almost 2 decades and guess who has a soft spot for chickens. So I commemorate this coming of age story with a painting:
I wanted to keep it abstract and light. Not over loaded with meaning. Two birds. Not representing anything other than themselves. The soft background is gesso based combined with practically every color of paint I had in my studio. The chicken is acyclic paint with a bent toward graphic design rather than painting. The one sparrow in pain-staking detail is also done in acrylic. The rest of the sparrows are drawn in charcoal.
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