The Chicken: HOW IT WORKS

Taking a degree in Scientific Illustration (flies, fleas, trees and tumours) seemed a good idea at the time: at least, I thought, I would be taught to paint something. The courses on offer at so many Art Colleges in the late 1970s presented a woeful lack of direction – at least those which I saw. There was a lot of letting it hang out and not a lot of the nuts and bolts of how to do it. I knew that I would need to be employable from day one - so for four years I drew bodies (living and dead) and shire horses…and wasps…and chickens…with an earnest focus.

At college, along the corridor, ran a parallel course to ours: Technical Illustration – rapidographs and ellipse guides, set squares and drawing boards saw those students learn to construct line drawings of gear boxes, motors and ejector seats. It was the stuff of the Haynes manual and the instructional ‘How it Works’ booklet. So it was that when I came up with the idea of painting an ‘anatomical’ chicken I decided to model it on the ¾ perspective view used for those classic explanatory diagrams. ‘The Chicken: How it Works’ – ha-ha, yes, very funny…

All that skill of those technical guys...they were amazing -  and they were all put out of business just a few years later by the arrival of the dread computer. Some of the first casualties ... and now the scythe of time and 'progress' is completing its work as AI puts us last remaining jobbing illustrators out of work.

And I - after Art College?

Well - having completed my course I had a portfolio stuffed with potential and proceeded to hunt down jobs drawing cuckoo’s eggs, gardening guidebooks and medical handbooks…However I very quickly realised that if I continued upon this course I’d never be asked to use my imagination: I’d never get to draw a gothic castle or paint a gnome or sculpt a Green Man….

And so I had to begin once again - and construct a completely new and different body of work to show to potential clients….

Still Scientific Illustration did seem like a good idea at the time – and I did learn how to draw chickens…