Chicken Butts

My fascination with roosters and chickens started early in life. Part out of guilt, part out of interest in their beauty and behaviour. When I was a preschooler we had chicks roaming our backyard. Now, back then, my father had not found the joy of yard work and our grass was as tall as me. I can’t remember which game my sisters and I were playing, what I do remember though is that I was zig-zagging in the tall grass, running, trying to catch someone or most probably, avoiding being caught. Neither happened. Instead I felt a warm fuzzy crunch under my foot. What had I done? Oh no!!! The horror of death!  

Childhood painting of a rooster

The pain in my heart from the guilt I felt was more than a little girl could take. This stayed with me for a long time, and if I dared to forget, my sister would remind me of my horrible deed. I guess due to this event, I often painted and drew chickens and roosters throughout my childhood. As a fifth grader, I entered a painting competition at school. I decided to do a painting of a rooster I had drawn a few times before. To my surprise, my painting won first place. This honor propelled me to want to be a painter. For some reason, after my golden moment, I never painted chickens and roosters again until I moved to Maxeys to open the Bed and Breakfast and met Big Daddy and his clan. Meeting them was love at first sight!

This love became the series “The Chicks Next Door”. The series exalts Big Daddy’s personality referencing the millennial generation’s idea that each of us has a “perfect”, golden persona. In the series the patriarch, Big Daddy, is the protagonist. He has a larger than life personality and he seems full of himself, but that is just a show or how the great Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernandez wrote , “Buche y Pluma no mas”, here sung by Myrta Sylva. He is a gentleman, very kind and generous with the ladies he guards, who consider him their protector. 

I am a portrait painter and personality is what I look for in a subject and Big Daddy has personality “para dar y regalar” (to give and gift)!

In February of 2019 we started furnishing and decorating the house and I was finally able to set up my studio space. That same week I decided to start a new painting. I chose to work from a picture of a small, old house not far from our place. This little house, abandoned for a long time, waved at me every time we drove by, telling me I needed to pay close attention to it, and by the grace of the magic of Maxeys, it became my favorite amongst all the other structures I had taken pictures of. I had only spent an hour or so on this oil painting and with everything else needing my attention to open the B and B in April, this little piece was soon forgotten on an easel. 

In May, the City of Maxeys, where we reside, was celebrating the grand opening of The Veterans Park. The B and B got a reservation from a couple from Birmingham, AL to stay, attend the event and visit the area, family and friends. Polly, who had left Maxeys when she was 17 years old, and her husband Bob, received a visit from Polly’s sister the day after their arrival. As I was giving her the tour of the house, Polly’s sister saw the unfinished painting of the small house and immediately recognized it as the house her and her siblings were born and raised in. I showed her the picture I was using for reference and she showed me the picture she had taken of it as they came into town, and sure enough, it was the same house!  

The excitement of this discovery led Polly to commission me three small paintings of their childhood home, one for each of the siblings, and later she commissioned me a painting of her current home. She also bought a small painting I had done a while back of a ceramic sculpture I own, that was hung in the room they stayed in.

That evening, after The Veteran’s Park Opening event, we arranged to have dinner with Polly and her husband, her sister and brother in law, and their cousin, who is still a Maxeys’ resident.  The reunion of these three ladies was an absolutely unique experience for me. I was able to witness the love they have for each other, combined with a distinctive southern sense of humor. It felt to me like I was in a movie!

The weekend Polly and Bob visited us, just shy of two months after opening the Bed and Breakfast, solidified the validity of our plan and truly showed me that serendipity happens in real life, not just in the movies.

I truly love the connections and coincidences of life!

However, the artist’s manifesto she talked to us about back in 2011 focused on how to help set up your mind frame in order to get the creative juices flowing. Being the practical person I am, this topic rang a bell and immediately I wrote my own Artist’s Manifesto using her opening sentence “An artist should…”.

Since then, my Artist’s Manifesto has been on the bulletin board in my studio and I refer to it regularly. It is not a philosophical statement, it is a practical work guideline. This manifesto has truly helped me be more productive as an artist. I have divided this manifesto into three parts: preparation (two parts, physical and mental), during, and after work. Of course, this manifesto is what makes sense to me and what works for me as a painter but it could be used as a guideline for others working in different mediums. I borrowed the idea from Ms. Abramovic, who had borrowed it from artists from the past.

 My artist’s Manifesto goes right along with another one of my bulletin board staples, the quote by H. Jackson Brown Jr.:

“The Best Preparation for Tomorrow Is Doing Your Best Today”

Your comments with additions and suggestions to this manifesto would be appreciated. And please, feel free to copy, paste and make it your own!

CYNZIA’S ARTIST MANIFESTO 

An Artist’s Work Guideline

Preparation  

Physical

An artist should take good care of her physical and mental health.

An artist should have her personal business in order to feel free to create.

An artist should start the working day with a clean and organized working area.

An artist should work on skills at all times.

Mental

An artist should work on ideas at all times and keep a log or sketch book of them.

An artist should keep herself informed of world news.

An artist should continue her education and expand her knowledge.

An artist should maintain communication with other artists.

An artist should stay informed of new works and visit galleries frequently.

An artist should keep a work schedule and stick to it.

An artist should not procrastinate.

During

An artist should always have good ventilation.

An artist should have good lighting.

An artist should use music for inspiration.

An artist should have a few pieces and/or projects going on at the same time.

An artist should measure at all times, measure, measure, measure.

An artist should check her drawing at all times.

An artist should keep her brushes in good shape.

An artist should change the solvent cleaner frequently.

After

An artist should work on marketing her work constantly.

An artist should be in control of her art business and finances.

An artist should feed her ego although not over feed it.

An artist should value her work and ideas and not doubt them.

An artist should consider others opinions but stay true to her ideas.

An artist should continue working on her work’s growth even when her present work has been accepted.

An artist should practice her drawing skills on a regular basis.

An artist should share her knowledge with others.

In 2019 she attended an open house for the Gillen House Luxury Bed and Breakfast in Maxeys, Georgia, which I co-own. Touring the house she saw the extensive renovations I had done to convert the 100 year old, six bedroom, two bath house into a five en-suite bedroom home. In September 2020, when she had the idea to build a free standing hair salon on her 100 acre farm, she told me she was very impressed with my work on the B and B and asked me to design her hair salon.  

I didn’t think twice about it and I took the job. Here was the opportunity to once again work on one of my passions: design. At first I was working the old fashioned way, drawing by hand with a parallel bar and triangles, and making a working model out of foam board.  When the time to produce the final drawings came, I decided to acquire the three dimensional program Sketchup. It was love at first click. This program has been so much fun to work with that now I do all my design work on Sketchup and use Autocad LT for final drawings.

The 500 sq. ft. hair salon was completed by the end of the year and opened to the public in January of 2021. I am extremely grateful to my client and now good friend who believed in my talents and shared her light with me.