Last month at the zoo in Ft Wayne we stopped in the petting zoo, my great-nephew's favorite part of the zoo. I snapped this photo of a large roster. And I thought about some of my recent works with major outlines and deep colors. This was not the right image to work from. The cock needs to be more in profile, to have more distinctive feather patterns. A quick search in Google Photos brought up every photo with a chicken in it that I have taken in the past 15 or 20 years. Yes, Google looks at your stored photos, categorizes them. If you use blogger, odds are many of your photos are in a google photo file. If you are an IPhone user odds are your photos are in IPhoto, and searchable the same way. I selected an image, and used it to sketch on canvass and now I am working on colors and patterns. Where did the inspiration come from? A cock in a petting zoo. And yes, I know the way I have written this will inspire creative comments from a few of you. I hope you have as much fun writing comments, as I am painting this big chicken.
I remember a very nasty and threatening cock in my childhood. God help you if he got his claws into you. But in spite of that bad cock experience when I was young, it never put me off cocks, in fact I am rather fond of them. I saw a really huge blue one in Trafalgar Square in about 2014, the biggest I've ever seen. You'd be in big trouble if that came after you.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hahn/Cock
DeleteThere is a big blue cock hanging out on the upper terraces of the east building of the National Gallery of Art here in DC.
DeleteOK. I’d go to a zoo more often if they offered big cocks for petting.
ReplyDeleteMany would,
DeleteWhat are we, 12? YES!
ReplyDeleteYup!
DeleteI once saw a bunch of painted cocks at the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. And you got to pet them, too.
ReplyDeleteI'll stop now.