I see chickens.
I picked up painting again in 2021 when I was in theory on sabbatical to write a book.
I started with scary toys and moldy food, then moved on to spiders and elephants, and a variety of other subjects. But I always spent too much time fretting about what to paint, instead of just painting.
Mike, who has an MFA, said “It doesn’t matter what you paint. It matters how you paint it, so just pick something and stick with that and see how it goes.”
At the end of last year, I started preparing chicken from scratch to feed my silly old doggie. I don’t typically eat chicken myself, so this was a new activity. The little guy gets a lot of attention and he goes through a LOT of chicken. So, I started feeling it was a bit unfair for chickens to go so unnoticed as living creatures. They just get tossed thoughtlessly into the nugget hopper. (Not by everyone, I know. I have friends who raise and name and love their chickens).
So I decided, in exchange for boiling one or two up every week for Rupert, I would really try to see chickens, so that chickens can be seen by other people, too. As soon as I decided to paint chickens, all on the same 7x7 paper, I started knocking out chickens very quickly. (This has nothing to do with me “working on a book”.)
Despite having a whole studio space for work, I paint chickens at our kitchen table. The kitchen is now full of chickens. After producing a dozen or two, I realized the paintings look like profile pics. I’d created an analog social network of pretend chicken friends. So, I started calling that corner of the kitchen Chicken Town, as one does.
I hope you enjoy Chicken Town.
