How Chickens and Bananas was painted
Sketching the chickens in a chicken pen is not as simple as it sounds. They are often quite agitated by the presence of a stranger and madly race about instead of being relaxed as you would want them to be. These were my mother-in-law’s chickens and it took a couple of days before they calmed down and went about just being hens. I could then sketch them properly. On this board, the outline of the hens etc. is wiped out of the wet under painting which is then allowed to dry. That doesn’t mean things are permanently fixed, the top hen was radically changed at the last stage.