Artist Mary Sprague’s fowl paintings came after a cross-country trip and a particularly inspired trip to an ostrich farm
By Susan Caba
Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
Short and sturdy, Mary Sprague has the hands of an artist, well-muscled and unmanicured. Her eyes are a soft green, the same intensity as her faded denim shirt. Those eyes—friendly, curious, warm—are nothing like the glare fixed on the face of her latest subject, who is clearly seething. These eyes are sharply focused, narrowed, beady and rimmed with red under great gray tufts of eyebrow. The chest puffs in gusty fury, the stance vibrates with belligerent energy.
Rarely has a chicken been so angry, or so big. This bruiser is as big as Sprague herself—5 feet tall or more. The chicken paintings are a typical exploration of the 72-year-old artist’s style and technique—so finely detailed, in parts, that a breath would ruffle their feathers, yet begun with a broad-brush swipe that is nothing more than a thought in motion.
“Motion is what it’s all about,” she says.
The chickens, she adds, are “all people I know,” but she’s reluctant to identify her human inspirations—except for one, a rather disturbed looking hen squawking on a nest. “That’s me,” she says, referencing the morning she realized that a Chicago art dealer had pilfered the proceeds from a sold-out show of her work.
Sprague landed here in the mid-1960s, with an MFA from Stanford and no intention of settling in the Midwest. “I was just going to be here a minute,” she says. She taught art atSt. Louis Community College; the title of a 1968 painting of a frazzled woman in a hat adorned with a red flower foretold her story: “What a Person Would Look Like If She Moved to Missouri and Taught for 30 Years.”
For the past 20, she’s lived and worked in a downtown loft, purchased when Washington was desolate and deserted.
She paints from a popemobile platform; it moves backward and forward, up and down, at the touch of a lever and allows her to reach the tops of her oversize paintings without balancing precariously on a stool, as she had been doing.
Why chickens? It’s a phase, she says, begun two years ago on a four–oil-change, three-month cross-country odyssey by art van. Her back was so bad, she was only comfortable in the driver’s seat—so she outfitted it as a studio, packed a credit card and set off with the idea of finding “little animals in big places.”
She ate ostrich at a greasy spoon in Tucumcari, N.M., then painted the birds at the nearby ranch where they were raised. “They’re very peculiar, and they taste good,” she says, looking at the graceful lines of an ostrich portrait. “It was a fabulous trip. When I came home, I did chickens.”
Friends sometimes ask her how she feels—now that chickens have become her subject—when she’s served fried chicken. “I feel really rewarded,” she grins.
Mary Sprague’s chickens are on display at the Duane Reed Gallery this month (7513 Forsyth, 314-862-2333, rduanereedgallery.com); the exhibit hangs through May 5.
