Chicken Coop II
The scene depicted in ‘Chicken Coop II’ is fairly ordinary – a child has been interrupted while playing with her dolls. But it is also suffocating and hellish. The innocence of the primary colour palette is corrupted by dark streaks of paint. The figure’s flesh tones are bright and lurid, almost raw.
As in many of her other paintings, Rhys James gives her subject her own facial features; the figure seems ageless, at once a parent and child. The painting’s title reminds us of feeling of entrapment of co-habiting with one’s family; the child is trapped by her familial relationships, as well as by the painting’s frame.
