Resting Chicken Face

Artist

Katie Fahrenbruch

Year

2021

Description

For Resting Chicken Face, Katie includes her pet hens, adding unpredictability amongst the more static flowers and leaves. They gaze out at the viewer, almost in a challenging way, as chickens can seem to do. Hence the title of the piece. They’re goofy, weird, sometimes intimidating tiny dinosaurs and she wants to show their personalities. The breeds she chose to represent are standard backyard flock hens; Rhode Island Reds, Barred Rocks, Buff Orpingtons, Welsummer and a young Black Cochin.

With Fort Collins’ history as an agricultural center of learning, (go Aggies!) the choice of chickens seemed fairly easy to Katie. Not only because of their use as livestock, but also their status as helpers in the garden and a mainstay in homesteading. The flora element that she chose, a representation of a Snowball Spirea shrub, effectively separates the five sides of the piano into their own compositions.

Katie Fahrenbruch is a Colorado-based interdisciplinary artist whose current work focuses on acrylic painting and ink drawings. She earned an Masters of Art from the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, in 2019, with a concentration in studio painting. Katie was first introduced to the art world by her Grandmother, a painter who has pursued a lifelong artistic career. Katie’s work explores the subjectivity of beauty and memory and questions the importance of identity and reality within the same. Her most current body of work utilizes hand-crafted repetition of organic images to explore the push and pull of a handmade aesthetic versus that of the prefabricated and mass produced.

Photos

Completed mural front.

Completed mural back.