It’s Burl Ives. It has to be.
Not quite as sure about this one.
I thought of Ed Wynn, but his glasses tended to be round, if Google images is to be believed. I asked AI for some suggestions about which famed entertainer was known for his oval-rimmed glasses, and it returned the following suggestions from most to least likely: Harold Lloyd, Peter Lorre and Buddy Hackett. Not sure “Buddy Hackett” in this context is an AI hallucination. Just a lousy opinion. Maybe there’s no single inspiration anyway.
Which came first, the chicken or the art center? There’s a definite answer to that, the chicken. Lots of chickens.
By the early 1970s, a sizable chicken farm in San Angelo, Texas, had run its course, and artists took to the task of redeveloping the place into the Old Chicken Farm Art Center. Fifty-plus years is a long time, but if you wander around the property in the morning sun, as Yuriko and I did, you’ll get a sense of the old chicken haunts.
No mere coops, but a poultry complex of an earlier time. I’m sure it was made obsolete by larger facilities and automation. These days, most of the spaces are art studios.
Because I can, I checked the numbers for chicken production in Tom Green County, of which San Angelo is the seat. Relatively few chickens, turns out: $220,000 in chicken sales in 2022, compared to $54.7 million in cattle sales for the county. Sounds like that might be a single chicken farm out somewhere from town. The town chickens, you might say, long ago flew the coop.
Being an art complex, there’s a lot of art and other objects on display, besides the wooden faces.
Being fairly early still on Monday morning, most of the studios weren’t open yet – they would be in the afternoon, when were already on the road to Marathon. We’d passed the night at the Inn at the Art Center Bed & Breakfast, in a room that opens onto a breezeway.
Artists had clearly been turned loose to design the rooms. Much to the better, I’d say. Ours was a two-bedroom unit with the sheen of an upmarket forest lodge, but without a particularly high price.
Unique woodwork for the walls.
Floor designs that I’ll take for unique.
In our time, you don’t even need hallucinogens to ramp up some trippy floor action.
All you need is a basic AI image generator, while you remain sober as a judge.