Cowabunga

I have always been fascinated by cattle. Long horned cows are an African obsession.  Wherever I found myself there were cattle. Some of my earliest memories are of cattle coming down to water on the banks of the Nile, smelling the scent of acacia, dust and dung. the dust. At Meroe  long horned cattle mark the Kushite cemetery. Horned cattle feature in ancient Egyptian  wall paintings and Hathor, one of their principal gods, is depicted with a cow’s head. I have heard ash smeared Dinkas singing to their cattle,  watched  red blanketed Masai  heading their cattle out from their bomas and Zulu boys in Natal driving parti coloured cows to pasture. In Zambia the gates of farms were topped by bronze hump backed zebus. I have stalked deer in Sussex over fields that were temporarily vacated by the resident Holsteins. In Belgium I have painted Friesians. Most of these locations have inspired  paintings. Time for some uniquely British cattle?

There seems to be a convention around St. Mawes that one should go for long coastal walks around St. Anthony’s Head to admire the sea views, so I was delighted to find ruby red cows on the clifftop pastures in Cornwall. The farms all seem to have these red cattle. I assume they are Devon Reds, a local variety that look like  deep russet versions of Jerseys but instead of the muzzle ending in a dark patch these ones are lighter.

On one such walk I glimpsed  a small herd all resting in the nearest field. About twenty to thirty metres away. They all ignored me but one of them turned to look. That was the stimulus for this picture.

The shape of the land gave me a strong push., generally sloping from left to right. I raised the horizon to eliminate the need to show any sky and introduced a squarish grouping of cows in the bottom right corner.  I used a major hedge which did quite two areas of grazed land conveniently splits the picture into two equal areas. The much admired sea  I gave a small role as a pair  of triangular gussets on the right hand side.

 I had my favourite set of threes: a trio of colours, red, green and blue and a trio of elements, cows,  brambly hedges and fields. Within those elements there were incidental variations to give it interest – the tracks through the arable planting on the headland at the top of the picture,  the cliffs leading down to a tiny beach, the little scrape where the cows had regularly wandered from one meadow to another and a tangle of different plants in the hedge.

I have made  three cows  into a monumental and suitably solid group in the bottom right hand corner and explored the detail  of the hedge in the bottom left, giving it equal space but contrasting the riot of plant shapes within it with the simple rectangular shapes of the sitting cows. I slipped one cow into a position where it half disappears behind the plants and made one very large head complete the group of cows on the right. The head is roughly three sided. Three again.