Dee Dee Beavers gently picks up a Minorca rooster, a bird with black silky feathers and white face patches, and strokes its neck and head while it makes chirping noises in response to the attention. She feels a little guilty because she's had to keep her feathered friends cooped up lately. A fox is on the loose and she can't afford to lose any of the 70 or so she uses to earn her livelihood.
"They're really pretty smart," Beavers said.
But Beavers doesn't sell the animals so they can end up on someone's dinner table. Instead the chicken's eggs become art.
The Oxford artist specializes in pysanka, an egg decorating tradition that has existed for thousands of years. In pre-Christian times, pagans colored the eggs to symbolize nature's rebirth in the spring. Christians integrated the pysanka into their Easter tradition, tying it in with the Resurrection of Christ, the egg being the symbol of the tomb. The art form took hold strongly in the Ukraine and thrived there for hundreds of years until religious oppression nearly stamped it out during the 20th century.
Beavers said, thanks in part to the US, pysanky hasn't completely died out. She digs through a pile of reference material on the subject and pulls out an April 1972 edition of National Geographic. Beavers' grandmother, [Lola Cannon of Rabun county Ga,] gave it to her when she was around 13, placing a note on the page with an article about pysanka. "You can do this" the note read. Ever since then, Beavers has been hooked on the brightly colored egg art.
"This article probably did more to push pysanky in the U.S. than anything else," said Beavers, a Rockdale county native.
Beavers begins a pysanka by sketching a design in pencil on the egg. She then applies thin lines of hot beeswax to areas she doesn't want colored. She dips the egg in a dye, and adds more beeswax to other sections of the egg, then places it in a different color dye.
"That's the hardest thing to get used to, working in a negative," she says. She continues the dying/waxing process until, at the end, she wipes away the wax, varnishes the egg and drains the yolk. Beavers doesn't eat eggs, and she winces as she suctions the yellow slimy contents from one of her completed eggs.
"Eggs make me sick," she said.
Making pysanky [the plural of pysanka] is Beavers primary source of income. She sells them for $10 to over $100 each, depending on how much time it takes to finish one, and estimates she can create more than a dozen in one night, if she's really working hard with no distractions. Local art shows and festivals used to be her primary venues, but all that changed when she got a computer. Beavers now sells her eggs online, where she's tapped into a international market.
But she knows that without her precious chickens there would be no pysanky. She keeps close to 300 chickens,ducks and turkeys, with over 22 different breeds of chickens that provide her with a variety of egg colors, shapes and sizes. Each egg that is destined to become pysanky is marked with the name of the chicken that produced it because sometimes pysanky collectors request eggs from certain chickens.
"The chicken part is neat. You know who laid the egg, and each chicken has a different story," Beavers said.
A Christian with a very deep faith, Beavers appreciates the role that the egg plays in both Christian and pagan traditions, one of regeneration and life, and she finds it rewarding that she can actually grow the materials from which she creates her art. She also tries to include traditional symbols on the eggs, like fish, roses or stars, which represent Christ, as well as more contemporary figures that inspire her, such as daylilies, watermelons or the occasional penguin.
"They are just so special. There is something really satisfying to creating them and they make people happy," Beavers said. "It's an original piece of work on a small delicate canvas, and you're only limited by what you can come up with."
