Artistic feet

How many times in the last five and a half years have we promised to never feature another animal artist?(3). And yet every time we threaten to abandon this rich category it just keeps pulling us back. And so it is with these painting chickens. Ink up the feet, step out on a few sheets of good quality paper and there you have it: high quality hen or possibly rooster art. As for the results, given that these are Chinese chickens, they are remarkably …. Chinese. The chickens' mentor, trainer and inker is the artist Xiao Hu as you know.

Champ chimp

While it’s true Legoflambpicked this story up and ran with it on Thursday, OTN remains the blog of record for animal art so here, if you caught it on LoL, it is again.

Turns out Bubbles (b.1983), the chimp that lived with Michael Jackson and the subject of Jeff Koons’s eponymous sculpture, has turned his own hand to art. This is the same chimpanzee that accompanied Jackson on his visit to the Mayor of Osaka during the Bad World tour and was allowed to join the two for tea. You can see Jackson and Bubbles doing the Moon Walk here.

Bubbles went to live with Jackson on the Neverland Ranch in 1988, the same year Jeff Koons made his famous porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles as part of his Banality series.In the early 2000s Bubbles became aggressive and was sent to an animal sanctuary eventually ending up in the Centre for great apes (CGA) in Florida where he  lives now.

In his old age (chimp years) Bubbles has taken up the brush and is making paintings one of which was sold at Art Basel Miami this week.

Images: Top, Michael Jackson with Bubbles and bottom, Bubbles painting

Show time

Our long battle to get some sort of recognition for animal artists has been a lonely one. To be honest, most of the support has come from the lunatic fringe and people who thought we were interested in art about animals, but now the whole field of animal art has entered a new plane thanks to the well-known German artist Rosemarie Trockel. As a curious link we met Trockel when she was in New Zealand when the City Gallery in Wellington opened the current building with a big survey show of her work curated by Greg Burke. 

 Anyway, Trockel may be one of the first artist curators to include an animal artist in a public art museum exhibition with her selection of work by Tilda, an Orangutan artist from the Cologne Zoo. Tilda joins a number of other untrained (human) artists whose work is presented alongside that of Trockel herself in Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos at the New Museum in New York. 

Artist support like this is rare. The only other instance we have been able to find is when a work by Congo (1954-1964) the famous Chimpanzee artist (discovered and given his first pencil by zoologist Desmond Morris) was owned by Pablo Picasso. More animal art facts as they come to hand. 

Image: Three paintings by Tilda hanging at the New Museum as part of Rosemarie Trockel’s work Less sauvage than others