EDMONTON – It often takes an outsider to see the beauty in a flock of chickens or a pen of pigs.
To city-raised Georgia Graham, the beauty in ordinary barnyard animals is worth turning into a picture.
“I look for patterns in agriculture, in a group of chickens or a field of cows,” said Graham during the Farm and Ranch show where she sold prints of her paintings and copies of the six children’s books she has illustrated.
“I notice the subtle beauty on the Prairies,” said Graham, who also likes to capture a bug’s-eye view of flowers or grain fields.
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“I find it easier to do something funny-looking than pretty,” said Graham, who exaggerates the animal’s features.
Graham will lie down on her belly in the mud to take a picture of a pig, or get eye to eye with a chicken to capture the right perspective for her paintings.
“I just like to draw farm animals.”
With no animals left on her farm near Lacombe, Alta., Graham sneaks into other farmers’ yards to chase chickens around the barnyard or crawl through pastures to get the right photos of hens, cows, pigs and goats.
“With the goats I crawled over a fence and started snapping pictures and got caught.”
Farmers are often bewildered when they find her chasing chickens around their yards.
But the prints of common animals have caught on and Graham now makes a living with her art and by talking to schoolchildren about art and illustration.
Graham said it’s mainly older women with memories of feeding chickens or pigs who buy her prints. Not many men buy pictures of chickens, she added.
For Gwen Hall of Boyle, Alta., who bought a picture of goats at the show, the pictures strike a chord.
“We have goats and this is how they look. It’s right on,” said Hall, who also has a picture of Herefords swimming in the North Saskatchewan River from one of Graham’s book illustrations.
Once Graham is assigned an illustration contract by a book publisher, it often takes her six months to draw the almost 20 detailed pictures.
She even scours old barnyards for the right tone of faded wood to turn into picture frames for each print.
“I look for colours to go with certain prints,” Graham said.
