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sinclairwebster

Chewing the cud

Updated: Oct 31

It has become a principle for me not to paint the same thing one after another but instead to switch between my themes to keep everything fresh. Fortuitously I came on the image behind this painting as we were leaving De Haan aan Zee where I had found my “Belgians”. My mind in neutral , no thoughts to clutter my seeing, I was open to receive. What do you see here? A bucolic pastoral scene, possibly a little bit high key in colour? There could be more to it than that. Imagine: these three Flemish cows peaceably chewing the cud might be thinking about how to reduce their methane output because of its deleterious effect on the environment. The dirty look you are getting  from the half closed eyes could be because you have interrupted a tricky bit of  calculus, so they are going to have to swallow the bolus in their mouths and start all over again.


We passed many flat fields with Friesian, or maybe Holstein Friesian cows lying down. There was no cover for them so they were just lying in the open fields. The air pressure was not particularly low so the old adage about cattle lying down when there is rain on the way did not apply, so there had to be some other reason. Having recently seen careful environmental engineering and forestry going on I realised that these were good citizen cows working out how they could help, unlike those cheese heads from across the border…

I have painted Friesians once before,  “Dutch Girls.” The landscape there is dominated by a group  of rather feminine pollarded willows, the sort of trees I was familiar with around my mother’s home town, but further north there were avenues of poplars and stands of poplars planted as wind breaks around the farm buildings, so I decided to incorporate them into my picture. The  shape of the farmhouse I recycled from one further south which I had taken a quick look at on our way north, to see what had changed. I took the shape but changed the scale so that here it is a humbler small holder’s steading, such as had been occupied by my Grandmother’s sister. Now such places have become week end retreats, “fermettes.”


The cows themselves threatened to be a problem if I left them in their natural black and white, they would not integrate into the picture but read as a collage. So I shifted the colours, the black becoming Prussian blue and the white a pale lilac. I told myself that if they were contre jour, this is probably how they would look. Then, to emphasise their bony shoulders and swollen bellies I highlighted these in magenta and yellow.


For me using simplified shapes mark another shift towards abstraction while the swirly foliage of the trees looks back to Expressionism. Had I included a farmer in his blue overalls the reference to Flemish Expressionism in particular, which focused on rural life would have been more explicit. However, three cows untended is comment enough on the impact of EU policies on the old farming communities and the imagined  thoughts of the cows are very politically engaged. Servaes and Permeke, I know where you lived. Look where I am taking you.


#poplar trees


'Chewing the Cud' Artwork by Sinclair Webster, British Contemporary Artist
'Chewing the Cud' Artwork by Sinclair Webster, British Contemporary Artist

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