Jacques Pépin - Art of the Chicken: A Master Chefs Paintings, Stories, and Recipes of the Humble Bird

Cherry Pear Chicken, 2020

To Gloria, with me, forever.

The Red Cabbage Rooster, 2021

Contents

The King of the Coop, 2018

by Tom Hopkins

I MET J ACQUES P PIN almost forty years ago. At that time, I had a commercial photography studio in my hometown of Madison, Connecticut, where Jacques and his family had moved. I had been working in product and lifestyle photography and photographing a large amount of artwork for color separators for lithographs and reproduction.

Jacquess publisher asked him for photographs for his new book, Everyday Cooking with Jacques Ppin, and his assistant called me to see if I was interested in the job. Jacques wanted someone close to his house so we could work more easily. My brother, Dan, a contractor who was working on Jacquess house, mentioned my name and the rest is history.

So, I set about shooting the photos for his book. Everything went well and Jacques asked me back for The Art of Cooking, which turned into a three-year project. Jacques believed the photographs should be close-ups of the recipe process and his hands so readers could learn technique from the photos. Most food photographs in those days were shot in a studio and had very little to do with the process of cooking, just finished pretty dishes. But Jacques has always been a teacher, and he felt the photos were as much a part of that process as were his recipes and notes. I found myself kneeling on his kitchen counter or straddling a ladder to get the right angle.

I learned a lot working with Jacques on that book and on many subsequent titles. I started shooting videos for many of Jacquess projects. Over the years I have shot probably ten thousand photographs and two hundred cooking videos. I learned what made a good food photograph, and I learned what made a good teaching photograph. And I learned a lot about food and especially about teaching people about cooking and food.

I also learned a great deal about friendship and loyalty. Soon after the second book, I began playing ptanque with Jacques and his friends (its a French game akin to Italian bocce), and our families became good friends. We worked seamlessly together with few words spoken. We traveled extensively, sharing many meals and wine over lively conversation.

Jacques is well known for his talents in the kitchennot just for cooking but for teaching as well. His other passion, which some people may not know, is painting. For five decades, he has been producing beautiful acrylics and oils of food, landscapes, still lifes, and abstracts. He has illustrated over forty-five years of menus from meals celebrated at his house. (Many of these are collected in his book Menus.) Years ago, I suggested we produce limited editions of some of these paintings to sell online and to use for fundraising. The Artistry of Jacques Ppin website (at JacquesPepinArt.com) has been met with overwhelming appreciation.

One of Jacquess favorite subjects to draw is chickens. All kinds of chickens. Colorful chickens, fantastical chickens, hens and their chicks, chickens with vegetables. Perhaps its because he hails from Bresse, a region that is famed for their plump, delicious chickens. Or perhaps its because the chicken is such a universal staple in world cuisine. Or simply because he finds them amusing and their antics fascinating. If it clucks and scratches, its likely Jacques has painted it!

Jacquess stories about chickens seem to mimic his paintings of themquirky, eclectic, and mesmerizing in their character and substance. I have experienced the talent, love, and teaching in Jacquess cooking, as have so many of his followers. This book gives everyone the chance to appreciate Jacquess wonderful stories and the art of his chickens.

Tom Hopkins

T OM H OPKINS has been Jacques Ppins friend and photographer for nearly forty years. He also curates, organizes, and photographs Jacquess artwork and is the managing member of JacquesPepinArt.com. Toms photography work has taken him from sports and fashion to lifestyle and food, and he continues to travel the world in search of new subjects and challenges. Tom lives with his wife, Christine, and their dogs and horses in Connecticut.

Angry Chicken, 2017

Proud Rooster, 2013

T HE TITLE TELLS you that this book is about art and chicken. What that really means is that this book is about my two passions: cooking and painting. The French anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss famously told us that the process of cooking is the process by which nature is transformed into culture. This process involves the most basic human need: eating. The common, daily, most ordinary event of everyones day is eating. Rich, poor, no matter your station in life, you must nourish yourself several times a day to survive. However, to elevate that daily celebration to a ritual where a family shares food around the table is to ennoble that basic need. To advance it through elegance, refinement, and beauty to a formal meal with several courses, wines complementing each dish, a decorated table, and elegantly dressed guests may just be the pinnacle of what civilization is. To cook for someone is the purest expression of love, and to share food with friends or strangers is a great equalizer. Around the table, social ranks fade. Rivals and opponents share the intimacy of the table, sometimes merging into friendly guests.

Painting is also a clear, pure expression of human enlightenment and civilization. Cooking and painting complete me; both are the expression of who I am, and they connect in my life. But there are differences and similarities. Food is evanescent. You make a dish, you eat it, and its gone. It is a short moment in time. What is left are food memories. Yet, these food memories are very powerful and will nourish you through the years. A painting is concrete, solid, and it remains forever as a testament to your creativity. It also continues to feed your soul and your spirit through time.

I havent been painting as long as I have been cooking, yet it is over half a century ago that I picked up a brush instead of a knife and began finding creative fulfillment through another outlet. About fifty years ago, I began a tradition of writing down and saving the menus of the dinner parties we had at home. I illustrated my menus with whimsical depictions of animals, flowers, fruit, vegetables, vines, landscapes. Only after I had acquired a thick stack of these mementos did I realize that an unusually high percentage of my drawings depicted chickens, often in comical, mischievous poses. I reimagined the birds parading as leeks, cabbages, pineapples, artichokeswherever my paintbrush led me. Time and time again I ended up painting chickens, and they have been a never-ending source of inspiration for me.

Looking over my feathered oeuvre, which soon extended beyond my menus to the easel that stands in my office (often supporting a chicken portrait in progress), I recall American folk artist Grandma Mosess observation: If I didnt start painting, I would have raised chickens. Like her, I prefer painting chickens to raising them, although I have tended small flocks over the course of my life, a practice that ended when keeping them became impractical because of my travel schedule and the predations of the clever racoons that patrol the woods behind my home in Connecticut.

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My chicken paintings in this book express different moments in time, different moods, different emotions, a feeling, or an attitude. I usually start a new painting with an idea, which may have been prompted by looking at flowers or walking in the woods or seeing chickens. I never try to depict exactly what I see. I try to catch an emotion, a feeling. After working on the canvas for a while, the painting takes a life of its own and sometimes completely moves away from the original idea. I react by adding shapes, color, and lines in an impulsive, spontaneous way, just because it feels good or it looks right, regardless of the accuracy of the subject matter. It is an exciting, pleasurable process that lets me express insight, emotion, and originality.