How can you not smile when you say "Chicken Haiku"?
Victoria is the face of Chicken Haiku, standing in for the creators, poet Karin Wiberg and artist Dawn Rozzo. Chicken Haiku started as a book of 24 haiku and complementary illustrations (available at most online bookstores and some brick and mortar shops), before expanding into a calendar and notecards.
Karin: In 2011 my husband and I went on our first tour of backyard chicken coops. A year later, we’d started our own little flock. Not only did we get delicious eggs, we got entertainment. During evenings of watching the hens free-range, I started writing haiku about them. When I met Dawn Rozzo and saw her artwork, I knew she’d be the perfect person to illustrate these amusing poems. I hope you enjoy our collaboration!
Dawn: When Karin first floated the idea of illustrating her chicken haiku, my immediate thought was Yes! Creating art within her framework of beautiful poems made visual decision-making a pleasure. I work in pencil, watercolor, acrylics, and collage. My collages contain handmade papers and/or papers reassembled from discarded books, which are then prepared with clear gesso for painting. I appreciated the irony of using disassembled books to create illustrations for a new book. For most of the chicken images here, I created illustrations to match Karin’s poems. However, a few times Karin saw my art and then wrote complementary haiku. It was fascinating to see how the two art forms played off each other.