Artist gives chickenhood its proper due

It was the beginning of summer and I had just fled my first stay in Ireland – wheelbarrowing concrete mix, frothing cappuccinos – back to the rural Midwest of the US, where I was planning my next move from the cool confines of mom and dad's basement.

Word got around that I was in need of a pursuit, and it came to me through my oldest friend, Nick, that his sister Holly was looking to start a crafts empire, and was putting out feelers for goods-creators. She had already recruited Bob, the former long-time farmhand on the dairy farm where she and Nick had grown up, to construct fleets of sturdy wooden patio chairs – would I care to join the team? I would and I did.

Back then I was tentatively known as an artist, still fairly fresh out of art school, with the fruits of my study having been dispersed before my post-university expedition to Ireland. Were you to look into the toilet (the room, that is) of any number of my closest friends and family members at that time you would be nearly guaranteed to find an art object of my making: printed bedcloth stretched over a nail-studded plank here, a tuxedo-jacket totem pole there.

The plan was for me and Bob to beaver away over the six remaining weeks or so leading up to the Summer Arts Fair in Brookings, South Dakota, so that we might be able to offer up a sufficiently diverse catalogue of objects for purchase. My role was to find some creative use for a horde of windows they had by some means managed to salvage from a church, and it was decided that I would paint idyllic countryside scenes on to their panes, with chickens as the lead feature.

So it began. Each morning I rose to drive my truck across town and into the rural ramparts to Bob’s house, next door to which I had set up my easel and paints in the large corrugated-iron shed. There Bob measured and sawed and hammered his incorruptible furniture before coating them in industrial paints: emergency red, caution yellow, be-wary orange. Bob was a solid man, in build and in character, rectangular, bespectacled and open-hearted. His doted-after dog Rover lay at his feet as we drank weak coffee during our frequent breaks. The air was thick with sawdust, grains of which embedded themselves in the fluorescent green daubs of bush on the church windows and in my chickens’ plumage.

And I took my art seriously. The number and positioning of chickens took much consideration. The expression in their eyes must embody chickenosity, with the nature of chickenhood given its proper due. Bob was my main and only critic in these matters, and he was unfailingly full of praise – barring the one instance when I departed from the idyllic and went experimental, depicting a chicken in free fall through a field of abstract shapes – denoting, I think, a sort of outer space of the mind, in which case he confessed to being nonplussed.

When the big day came we loaded Bob's trailer to the roof with patio furniture and art (not having taken into consideration the weight and fragility of painted windows) and drove the 700 miles from southern Illinois to South Dakota, where the arts fair was already unfurling.

There were stalls selling needleworks, ceramics and other assorted ephemera, but no painted chicken windows – it seemed we had cornered the market.

After setting out our own stall I walked through the fair, testing the barbecue options and watching demonstrations of medieval practices (cauldron-stirring, weapon-making). The fair was well attended despite the stultifying heat and humidity. Holly sat and sweated in the stall, waiting for sales, while Bob and I stood back and noted how our work was received by the public: for Bob’s, approving; for mine, quizzical.

Sales by the end of the day were not good – two or three chairs, zero chicken windows. Perhaps we had overestimated demand for overweight art in urban South Dakota. Day two was no better, and day three was literally a washout, bringing the grand total for chicken window sales to zero. If anyone is interested, they are still for sale, half price (though shipping costs may vary from mom and dad’s basement to yours).