The chicken painting has changed! Read more about it here:
<\/strong>The changed chicken painting<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Almost Canada Day over here (tomorrow, July 1)<\/strong><\/strong> and Independence Day at our American neighbours (July 4), so I will start with wishing you all wonderful, sunny, peaceful and enjoyable holidays!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh how I struggled with this new painting! It started with a good base and I was happy to be able to depict the farm house faithfully. It is based on a photograph of a very old building in a forest close to my birth-region in The Netherlands. The farmer never knew I took pictures of him feeding his chickens. One of the series made it onto the front page of a Humane Society magazine in the 80’s and I have always wondered how it would do as a painting.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, I know that now. I can assure you it was a lot of pain<\/strong>-ting to get it done! The farmer was easy, since my natural inclination is always towards the human subject. To my surprise I also loved working on the trees. Then came the chickens and I had to ‘peck and choose’ because most of the pictures in the series have way too many in them, mostly seen from the back. I fought with each chicken to get it in the right place and I discovered that chicken-bums are really fun to paint! <\/p>\n\n\n\n This was one of the very first paintings I did in acrylic and colour, following the process of ‘underpainting’ of the old masters. With this technique, a subject is painted multiple times, in many different layers. It is a fascinating process that can create depth to especially the human subject, that is hard to attain with the ‘impasto’ technique, where you start painting the subject in a more direct way, with only a handful of layers of paint. This was my first try at it<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n There was only one (partial) chicken in this portrait – in the new painting there were many, many more. I had to omit the ones that were not in the right place or not looking good enough to my, ehem, artistic standards. And it quickly became a problem. My original plan of faithfully painting the scene was already out of the window and now I was faced with a big empty space below the farmer and I was unsure what to do with it and how detailed to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One approach was to put two big chickens in the foreground, by way of a funny element. It gave me the chance to bring in tons of detail. Chickens really have very expressive faces and their colouring is often fabulous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other option was much more serious and required that I would try to depict dappled shading. This is an art in itself and the old masters from yonder years developed different ways of doing it. They<\/em> were mostly landscape painters and I most definitely am not. But I have never shied away from a challenge, so when a fellow artist friend suggested to go for it, I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The result is interesting. When I am not working on a portrait commission that depends on a good likeness, I feel more free to experiment. Because nobody really has to see the end result plus: I learn a lot as I go. This one was as hard as I expected it to be and a lot of fun and it feels good to share it with you!<\/p>\n\n\n\n A big project is currently hovering in the background and while part of my brain is pondering the right approach for that one, I have time to do this kind of free styling. It is on the wall in my studio now. And as usual, I may still work on it a bit after letting it cure for a couple of weeks. I hope you enjoy it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" June 30, 2023 Post script:The chicken painting has changed! Read more about it here:The changed chicken painting Almost Canada Day over here (tomorrow, July 1) and Independence Day at our American neighbours (July 4), so I will start with wishing you all wonderful, sunny, peaceful and enjoyable holidays! Oh how I struggled with this new painting! It started\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2671],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artists-blog"],"author_meta":{"display_name":"Nicky","author_link":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/?author=1"},"featured_img":null,"coauthors":[],"tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["Artist's Blog<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Artist's Blog<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":"1","relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 3 years ago","modified":"Updated 8 months ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on ","modified":"Updated on "},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on ","modified":"Updated on "},"featured_img_caption":"","series_order":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19036"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20199,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19036\/revisions\/20199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.iamnow.today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/Screenshot-2023-06-30-at-1.51.25-PM.png\")
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