Niki Gessler Artist

06/01/2026

05/28/2026

Poor Jinx. Before she came to me, she had broken her beak and her nice person took her to the vet and gave her a round of antibiotics while she healed. She even trimmed her beak while it was healing because, if you know birds, their beaks are always growing and of course she wasn’t using it as a shovel to keep it filed down because it was tender. It grew back straight! What a relief. When she came to our farm, I got some special nail clippers to prepare to keep her beak maintained but before I got the chance to- one morning I went out to find her with a perfectly filed beak! This was a sign her beak was healed completely! It’s really an amazing thing. I remember helping my little piglet, Guapo, through a mouth wound last year. It’s a hard one, because of course we all use our mouths all day. Anyway, she got through that, and even got through losing her 3 chicks earlier this year, and now she got her bell rung by some passerby dog. Bad luck that these things keep happening or good luck that she always pulls through? Jinx is a very rare Recessive Slate Heritage Breed Turkey. Up until a few years ago, this breed was extinct in the Americas (their native home). I’m working on building their numbers back, but they’re still few and far between. I don’t know of any other breeder in the state of Indiana. Maybe this post will help?

05/25/2026

The turkeys are growing! Are you, or is someone you know, interested in raising heritage breed turkeys? I’ll soon have 5 for sale!

05/22/2026

Hello followers!

I will NO LONGER be checking this Facebook account. If you contact me on Facebook messenger, I will not see it. However, my phone number and email address can be found under ‘contacts’.

I will be using Instagram only now, but not deleting this account for those who use Facebook only. My accounts are linked, so everything I post on IG is automatically posted here.

Why? Because Facebook is dead. I couldn’t be more against generative AI and Facebook is a cesspool of it. No new humans are joining Facebook; people are only leaving and more and more bots are creating fake profiles.

What kind of world is that? Not one I want to be a part of.

Eventually I plan to figure out how to leave social media completely while keeping my business as an artist. This is step two. Step one was getting rid of my person page. What a great decision that was!

05/21/2026

Got my hammock, my pool, my geodesic dome, my handsome cowboy husband, and my watercolor illustration of my own cow on a wine bottle! What else could you want? Jelena from is back in production!

05/21/2026

SHE’S BACK in production! Remember when I made a beautiful watercolor image of my beautiful cow for ?! It was a sad day when all the Jelena sold out but now she’s BACK! Take a trip to the winery to try some for yourself! Or come to the Open House this Saturday starting at 5pm! I’ll bring a bottle to share!

05/21/2026

We found a squatter in our wheat patch today 😒 I guess if I was a cat, I’d want to snooze in there, too. Hard red winter wheat, for anyone wondering! We like to plant an eighth of an acre but the weather last year stopped us from getting that plot seeded in the fall. But I didn’t want to pass up getting wheat at all this year, so we have this tiny cat patch.

05/21/2026

This group got out for the first time today. It’s been raining a lot and Powder has been insisting on not being under cover, so her feathers are rough-looking. I’m going to give her a chance to take some dust baths (didn’t have a good place for it where she was- too much rain!) and if she still looks bad, I’ll look into bathing her like a 4H Turkey! 😆 her 8 little ones are almost fully-feathered and once they are, 5 of them will be looking for new homes. The 3 recessive slates will stay here… probably.

05/20/2026

Initially, I thought this would be pretty cool as a linoleum print. Maybe I could even make myself some fabric! Then I realized the number of blocks I would need would just be too cost prohibitive. Then I thought, hey, I could just do wood blocks! Then I realized the pesky little problem I created for myself 😆 So I thought, this design is too complex for hand printing- it’ll never line up. But part of making art, and part of life, is solving problems. So off I went. Don’t be afraid to solve problems yourself. You don’t have to throw in the towel and accept your situation or give up. Maybe you can fix your country- I mean painting. It’s not too far gone. Just one healthy revolution…