Chicken Lady

I like to show people how I work. Here are the stages of work in my latest painting, Chicken Lady. The initial sketch came from a scribble done by my daughter, who is two years old. (Unfortunately, the scribble has been lost). Each stage here is approximately 2-4 hours of work. It took me about a week to complete the painting.


In the initial stage I block in colors and shapes to work out the composition.


Because I am working from subconscious ideas, I do not meticulously plan out the painting before I begin. I work intuitively, letting ideas come to me as I paint. The buildings in the background of this picture are from sketches I did as a student.


Here you can see more evidence of my method of changing ideas as I go. There was a pause of several days before these last two stages, as I tried to decide what to do with the ground. Initially, it was going to be rocks that morphed into seeds the chicken was eating. But I liked better the idea of the mesh fence becoming the ground the hen is standing on, like a chicken does in a stack of cages. That is also the source of the eggs and grubs both being in the cavities of the ground.

View a larger image of Chicken Lady.
I found the original scribble. See it here.