Chicken & Rooster Wall Art

Chicken and Rooster Wall Art: The Usual Mistake

The common error is buying small. These almost always go in a kitchen or a dining room, and people default to a modest size because the subject feels casual, then hang it on the one large expanse of wall the kitchen has. A small bird on a big wall looks apologetic. Kitchens are also full of visual competition — cupboard doors, tiles, appliances, hanging pans — so a print needs more presence here than it would in a bedroom, not less.

Style choice is the second thing people get wrong. There are broadly two families in this subject. One is the graphic, folk-leaning rooster: bold shapes, strong flat colour, closer to a painted sign than a portrait. The other is the photographic close-up, where you can see individual feather barbs, the ridged comb and the odd reptilian eye. They suit different rooms and they do not hang together, though a great many kitchens have ended up with one of each.

Consider the head-on portrait if the wall is narrow. A bird photographed straight on, filling the frame, works in the awkward vertical slots kitchens tend to offer — beside a doorway, between two units, on the return of a chimney breast — where a wide farmyard scene would have to be cropped to fit.

Colour is more manageable than the subject suggests. Most breeds sit in russet, black, cream and grey, with the comb and wattles supplying a single hot red note. That red is the thing to check against your room, because it is small in area and disproportionately loud, and it will either tie a scheme together or sit at odds with a warm pink or an orange-toned wood.

Grease is the honest caveat. Anything hung near a hob collects a film over time, so keep these off the cooking wall and on the eating side of the room, where they stay clean and where people actually sit and look at them.