I have been painting chickens for the last 20 years- beginning with the advertizing of our family’s poultry farm business thru the eventual move of my studio into the defunct slaughterhouse. Somehow chickens fall easily from my brush, leaving painstaking impressions of my psyche and chronicling retrospective concerns of my community- such as the source of food, the use of land, the clarity of love, the isolation of individuals. With the inclusion of text from headlines to personal lists, stories emerge and dissolve through the process of the painting. Layering in the push and pull of darks and lights, the paintings gel into a narratives of our anxious era, a larger tale of the moods of soul and season.

Because of the space and time I am afforded to work, much of my painting up to this has been intimate in dimension. I would like to enlarge the images to a much more confrontational scale. I recently moved out of the poultry slaughterhouse (because of ventilation needs) into a much larger barn. My goal is to further push the images so that they reflect the chicken as legend in our cultural mythology and account for my current truths.

...