Week #48, Thanksgiving

Untitled (Chicken), c 1938, pastel on paper, 15" x 20"

For the holiday, herewith a lovely early work by Dusti Bongé. It is a large pastel drawing of a chicken, and yes I know it should be a turkey, but we were fresh out of turkeys, what with the fact that we never had any.

And, although chickens are obviously not really part of the traditional Thanksgiving fare, there is something about this drawing and its lovely range of warm hues, that suggests a celebration of fall and all it brings us. And Thanksgiving surely is that.

This particular hen appears to be brooding in a basket, which in turn is sitting either on a wooden table or perhaps on a checkered table cloth, depending on how one reads the surrounding pattern of lines and/or the structured patchwork of colors. Dusti created at least 3 of these larger pastel drawings of chickens, each with a similar composition, where the bird is clearly recognizable, but its immediate surroundings are mostly abstract. As such they are an excellent example of her awareness of regionalist trends in art combined with her own deeply modernist aesthetic inclination.

Dusti did have chickens in the 1930s when she first moved back to Biloxi with Archie and Lyle. And like so many other things in her immediate surroundings, which she would often draw or paint back in those early days, her hens were no exception.

If only she had had turkeys…..