Completely Crazy Creatures

Rolled up yellow rain jacket tied to the back of a saddle on a horse.
Yellow Rain Jacket
Donald W. Coen, United States
1989

After observing Donald Coen’s painting Yellow Rain Jacket, students will draw in missing parts of the horse on a printed copy of the painting. Students will also add parts of other animals to the original image to create imaginative animal hybrids.

Intended Age Group
Early childhood (ages 3-5)
Standards Area
Visual Arts
Lesson Length
One 25 minute lesson
Objectives

Students will be able to:

  • identify and describe artistic details in Coen’s painting;
  • identify signature parts of a horse; and
  • use their imaginations to create their own creatures.

Lesson

  1. Warm-up: Play “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” with the students. If a student misses the spot where the tail should go, ask them to identify what part of the donkey’s body they found.
  2. Show students Coen’s painting Yellow Rain Jacket. Ask students to identify the animal in the painting. How can they tell the animal is a horse? (Because of the warm-up activity, you might need to point out some differences between a donkey and a horse.) What parts are missing from this horse?
  3. Ask students to think about what the horse might be doing. Is he resting? Eating? Neighing? Just hanging out? How can they tell what he is doing? Ask students to imitate how the horse might sound.
  4. Pass out copies of Complete the Horse! handout. Invite the students to draw in the missing body parts of the horse: the head, tail, legs, mane, etc.
  5. Pass out another copy of the painting to students. Ask them to draw heads, tails, and legs of animals other than horses on the printouts to create new animals from Coen’s painting.
  6. Display the students’ creations for everyone to see and admire!

Materials

  • One game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey
  • Crayons, markers, colored pencils, or other coloring tools
  • About the Art section on Yellow Rain Jacket
  • One color copy of the painting for every four children, or the ability to project the image onto a wall or screen
  • Two printouts of the Complete the Horse! handout for each student

Standards

CO Standards
  • Visual Arts
    • Invent and Discover to Create
    • Observe and Learn to Comprehend
    • Relate and Connect to Transfer
  • Language Arts
    • Oral Expression and Listening
21st Century Skills
  • Critical Thinking & Reasoning
  • Information Literacy
  • Invention
  • Self-Direction
Rolled up yellow rain jacket tied to the back of a saddle on a horse.

Yellow Rain Jacket

1989

Donald W. Coen, United States

1989

54 in. x 73 in.

Denver Art Museum Collection: Gift of the artist, 2000.84

Photograph © Denver Art Museum 2009. All Rights Reserved.

About the Artist

Don Coen was raised on a ranch in Lamar, Colorado, and now lives in Boulder. As a kid, he made hundreds of cowboy and Indian drawings, inspired by the likes of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. He also sketched maps, people, and comic book characters while listening to the radio at night. “Thank God we didn’t have TV,” he says. Coen went on to study art at the University of Denver and the University of Northern Colorado. At that time art was all about abstraction, so most of his early paintings focused less on realism and more on color and form. Several years later, on a trip back to the Lamar family ranch, Coen witnessed a stunning plains sunset that led him to return to subjects of rural western life. He says:

I feel what I am doing is important because this type of life—farm and ranch life—is changing rapidly. It seems like every day a farm family goes out of business. These are proud, honest, hard-working families whose story has never been told in art. I’m trying to tell that story in my work. I feel I have a kinship with them in that I spent the first 20 years of my life on a farm.

Coen’s signature tool is the airbrush, which he likes because he can achieve a highly luminous paint surface. His airbrush applies paint in extremely thin coats, and Coen creates rich, sophisticated colors by strategically layering them. “The color you put underneath has a tremendous effect on the color on top. It always shows through. If you want to paint, say, a brown area, you shouldn’t ever use brown paint but colors that, mixed together, will give you brown.” He doesn’t use white paint, but simply allows more or less of the white of the canvas to show through. Some areas of his paintings have as many as 70 light coats of paint, and each painting takes three or four months to complete.

What Inspired It

In place of his childhood visions of romantic cowboy adventures, Coen chooses to focus on quiet, ordinary moments in today’s rural West. As a contemporary ranch insider, he strives “to show the truth and the beauty and simplicity of what’s really happening in rural America, without all the clichés that go with it.”

This painting was inspired by a trip to Cheyenne Frontier Days, a yearly celebration of the West in Wyoming. Coen likes to arrive at the fairgrounds very early, before any other visitors are there, and watch the cowboys milling about with their horses tied up, getting ready for the day. He says, “I just loved how this yellow rain jacket was on the back of this saddle, the look of the saddle, the way the light was hitting on it, the way the horse was standing there; it was a great image.”

Details

Focus

Coen carries a camera everywhere, shooting hundreds of images, and he creates paintings from his own photographs. He shoots his source photos with a telephoto lens, which for this piece allowed greater focus on the objects in the foreground while blurring those in the background. He creates a telephoto effect in the painting with softer focus on objects farther away.

Hints of a Story

The text on the saddle, “Champion Team-Roper, Reno-Nevada, 1985,” is located smack in the middle of the painting and it introduces a person you don’t see—the champion team-roper. The story of the rider isn’t in the action you see or in expressions you can interpret, but we can look for clues given by the artist:

• the yellow rain jacket, and its significance implied by the title;

• the rope hanging over the saddle horn;

• the back end of another horse nearby; and

• visible wear from the buckle on the saddle strap.

Black Mane

Coen does not use black paint, yet there are parts of this painting that look black. If you look closely at the hairs of the horse’s mane, for example, you can see that they are actually composites of color, built up with layers of blue and purple.

Contemporary Details

The black material wrapped around the saddle horn, or handgrip, is made of inner tube strips—modern day team ropers do this so that a rope will catch and not slide off the saddle. Coen thinks too many Western artists are frozen in the past; he likes to show the West as it really is.

Soft Lines

Coen painted Yellow Rain Jacket with an airbrush. Airbrush guns break down paint into very fine particles and use compressed air to spray the paint onto the canvas. Coen prefers to create a “soft edge, a personal kind of edge” with his airbrush. When he needs to paint an edge, he designs a plastic stencil and attaches it to the painting with rolled-up pieces of masking tape, rather than putting the stencil flat against the canvas. This way the paint bleeds over the edge, creating a blurry line.

Dot Patterns

One of the reasons Coen likes using an airbrush is for the dot pattern it can create. Areas with a dot pattern are blurry up close, but they resolve into objects when you move away from the painting—like the effect Coen got as a kid when he would stand close to a large movie screen. He creates different sizes of dot patterns with different airbrushes.

Cropped View

In this painting, Coen focuses on the central part of the horse, with the head, mane, tail, and legs cropped away. By photographing just this part of the horse, he is able to notice things he initially missed, like the veins on the horse’s neck or the little piece of the mane that is slightly raised as if in a breeze.

Large Canvas

Yellow Rain Jacket is nearly 4 ½ feet tall and 6 feet wide. Coen likes really large canvases, partly because of his experience with big views on the plains and also because of his fondness for film and old, big-screen movie theaters. He also likes how you can be absorbed into a large painting. Working with an airbrush, Coen needs to maintain a careful position in relation to canvas, so he has rigged up a pulley system in his studio that allows him to raise or lower his large canvases through a slot he’s cut out in the floor. Supporting his wrist to keep steady, he slowly and carefully sprays as he walks back and forth.

Funding for object education resources provided by a grant from the Morgridge Family Foundation. Additional funding provided by the William Randolph Hearst Endowment for Education Programs, and Xcel Energy Foundation. We thank our colleagues at the University of Denver Morgridge College of Education.

The images on this page are intended for classroom use only and may not be reproduced for other reasons without the permission of the Denver Art Museum. This object may not currently be on display at the museum.