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La belle Hortense (Francine Huot) acrylic
Here is some contemporary chicken art by Canadian painter, Francine Huot. Huot was born in Chateau-Richer, a town near Quebec City and she came to professional painting later in life, after raising a family and making a career as a nurse.
Look at the splendid bravura lines of jagged red, white yellow and brown which form a ball of abstract calligraphic squiggles…which is somehow a perfect hen striding through the summer countryside. Some paintings are filled with allusions, deeper meanings, and extraordinary portents of doom and glory. This painting is not like that at all. It is a beautiful swift impression of a chicken. Yet its bravura freshness and speed also convey real feelings of the darting hungry energy of the poultry yard. It is a lovely work of contemporary impressionism. I wonder if Huot’s life as a nurse (a profession where one does extremely neccessary things with swift economy) influenced her life painting chickens with a flurry of swordsman’s brushstrokes!
Okay! I haven’t been writing about turkeys as much as I should and Thanksgiving is on THURSDAY! Where did the year go? Fortunately, I still have some pictures left over from my trip home to my parents’ farm back in September. I have written about the geese and the renegade bourbon turkeys of the past, but this year my parents were passing by the grain store and there were poults for sale. So now there is a whole new crop of turkeys running around again (which is good because they are my favorite barnyard creatures). Here are some turkey photos and I show up in them too (both because of the shameful personal vanity which characterizes this era and because the lens on the front of my camera is cracked after an incident with some buttery fingers and an online fruit pie recipe).
If you are curious what breed of turkeys these guys are, they are putatively broad-breasted bronze, but they don’t really look like the broad breasted bronze turkeys of my youth. They are all lanky and tall! These turkeys are pretty endearing and always come over to quizzically see what people are up to, but don’t be fooled–they are not completely domesticated and they are always getting in trouble. Lately they have taken to escaping the poultry yard by walking way back into the woods where there is no fence and then coming back around the outside of the fence so they can stand in the road. It isn’t a completely stupid strategy since there are all sorts of fat grasshoppers and suchlike tasty bus by the road, but people drive fast and carelessly and it takes a big bird some time to get off the ground.
I don’t think my parents have any plans to eat these noble fowl as part of annual giving-of-thanks ritual sacrifice. These are lucky ornamental (or pet?) turkeys, but they are flagrantly transgressing against America’s love affair with motor carriages, open roadways, and unsafe speeds. So maybe the turkeys are walking up the great pyramid towards sacrifice even if they are spared from the platter. Hopefully they can learn road safety before it is too late, because I really like them. Look at those droll facial expressions!
Saturday (January 28th, 2017) was Chinese New Year! It’s now year 4714, the year of the fire rooster! Holy smokes, that sounds like an intense animal. Ferrebeekeeper is going to celebrate the spring festival with a whole week devoted to chickens (especially roosters). I write a lot about other animals, but I owe a truly inconceivable debt to chickens, since chicken and rice are my staple foods. Indeed, I eat so many chickens that, I am probably going to get to the afterlife and find hundreds of thousands of angry spirit chickens waiting for me with flame eyes and needle sharp ghost beaks. A week of pro-chicken posts can only help when that day comes.
Tomorrow we will talk about the ancestral wild chickens—the red junglefowl of the subcontinent—and how they became humankind’s favorite bird (if you look at the scale of chicken farming, I think you will agree that no mighty eagle, or super-intelligent pet parrot can compare in our collective esteem). We have some other observations to make about chickens as domestic animals and some rooster anecdotes. A brain-damaged rooster was the animal sidekick in Disney’s latest (amazing) princess film. My parents have an ugly multicolor rooster who is somehow endearing himself to them. Before then though, so I have something on this first workday of, uh, 4714, I would like to present these 4 chicken themed flounders.
The one at the top is a fairly straightforward rooster, greeting the dawn from the back of a turbot which is swimming between classical urns and stars which look like flowers. We will talk more later about the second flounder/chicken hybrid (which not only evokes the lost world of zoomorphs, but also speaks to my roommate’s latest creative/spiritual/magical pursuits (?). This leaves the third flatfish (in glowing green), a clear allegory of the serpent tempting humankind to taste chickens (as various mythical animals and imps excluded from creation look on from beyond the charmed circle).
Finally, there is a contortionist aiming her bow at a target beyond this world as a glowing multicolor cock stares her beadily in the eye. The sable flounder is surrounded by bats in the crepuscular sky as well as an armadillo and a horny toad. We will talk more about chickens tomorrow, but these images should give you plenty to think about as you start off the new year.
Wipp Ottenbach Coat Of Arms
Roosters are well known for being vain, arrogant, aggressive, greedy, and loud. They are also famous for being brave and for leading their flocks. Those are also the universally acknowledged traits of noblemen–so it is unsurprising that the rooster/cock is a popular device on shields, coats of arms, and heraldic standards. Ancient vases indicate that the rooster was a device of nobles and warriors at least as far back as the classical Greek age. Here is a little gallery of rooster heraldry both historical and fantastical which I found on line (actually I slipped a few hens in to the mix to make it more fun). Enjoy the escutcheons and the poultry!
Official Coat of Arms of the Kurów Commune
The Hahn Coat of Arms
Coat of Arms of Štúrovo, Slovakia
The Great mathematician Pierre Deligne was ennobled to viscount by the Belgian throne in 2006 and he chose this coat of arms
The Coat of Arms of Mosjöen, Norway
House Swyft of Cornfield (from George. R. R. Martin’s vast fictional realm)
A Replica of an Ancient Greek Hoplite Shield
A Viscount’s Coronet (from a book binding)
The Shield of Dorking in the Mole River Valley (with bonus swan)
Also the Four-toed Chicken of Dorking’s Judo Club
A Fantasy Crest from California
The arms of George Alcock of Roxbury, Massachusetts (ca. 1630)
White Crested Black Polish Rooster
Allow me to present a truly magnificent breed of show chickens! Polish chickens are known for their plumage—especially their splendid bouffant crests. Despite the name, Polish chickens were apparently bred in the Netherlands (although there are some apocryphal stories about how they first arrived in Europe with Mongol raiders!). Some historians speculate that they are known as Polish chickens because their feathery crest resembles the flared hat of the Polish lancers, but the real reasons for the name are lost in time.
A Polish Lancer of the Imperial Guard (re-enactor)
Bantam Frizzle Polish
Bearded White Polish Hen (from Cackle Hatchery)
Like many of the truly chic, Polish chickens suffer for their beauty: their feathery crests impede their vision—which often makes them skittish and flighty. They have good reason to be anxious: because of their reduced eyesight, they are easy prey for foxes and other predators (and, if kept with other doughtier breeds of chickens, they fall low on the pecking order).
Tolbunt (Beard) Polish Hen
Golden Laced Polish Chicken
Silver Laced Polish Rooster
Polish chickens are mild-mannered and can make good pets (if you happen to want a pet chicken). Additionally they can be decent egg-layers–though nothing like modern egg-laying breeds like the leghorns. As you can see from the images included in this post, there are many different colors and varieties of polish chickens to suit your palette and your ornamental tastes!
Buff Laced Frizzle Polish Hen
I’m afraid I don’t have a huge amount of time to write a complicated blog post today, but I thought I would share these endearing photos of a broody chicken nesting on a basket of cute puppies. Mabel the chicken is a pet chicken who lives on a farm in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Her owners saved her from the dining table because of her likeable personality. The hen looks after the puppies as though they were chicks whenever the puppies’ mother is outside.
ferrebeekeeper 