Gallus

Jesse Allen

"Gallus" is the Latin word for "Rooster", in this case a strutting fighting cock with long, exaggerated spurs. Allen's rooster has elaborate, multi-colored feathers and an oversize comb and wattles with circular adornments. The vicious "sport" of cockfighting is not a major issue in most of Africa, but there is a following in the Luhya / Abaluhya communities of Kenya, Allen's home country.

Medievalist UCLA Professor Verdel Amos Kolve commented about Allen's works: "His childhood and adolescence were spent near the Rift Valley of Kenya and the wilderness, loneliness, and innocence of that landscape and its creatures- birds, animals, trees- have been preserved and metamorphosed into new worlds of the painter’s imagination, an inner country for the mind which these paintings, one at a time, delineate with absolute sureness and authenticity. They are not paintings of Africa: the animals are imaginary, as fantastic as any of the creatures of a medieval bestiary, and possessed of an extravagant beauty."

Painter and printmaker Jesse Allen was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1936, into a British family who had immigrated from England in the 19th century. As a teen he was sent to school in England, where he eventually attended Oxford University and graduated with a degree in modern languages. After relocating to San Francisco, California in the early 1960s to teach at Stanford University, he began painting.

He would eventually retire from teaching to focus entirely on art, learning intaglio and lithography printmaking and working in oils and watercolors as well, exhibiting his work with Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco. He continues to live and work in Northern California.