I have been working on a series of paintings of cows visiting museums. In this series I combine my love of cows which started on our farm in Virginia, with my love of art history and the joy of visiting art museums in my travels.  As a child, our family vacations were destination drives to the Art Institute of Chicago.  My family loved art and we had a collection of Time Life Books on different artists that I obsessed over..

Magritte is an artist I have always admired for his incredible Surrealist works and for his great skill as an artist.  I loved choosing a painting of his for my series although I had so many possibilities that I will have to paint another.  Magritte had a very sad early life which may have influenced his art..His mother's tragic suicide in my opinion can be read in his work. For more about Magritte read https://www.wikiart.org/en/rene-magritte.  Despite difficulties, Magritte became a very skilled painter.  He had the ability to seemingly render anything he could see or imagine.  I was very lucky to see a retrospective exhibition of his work some years ago in Belgium.  The beauty of those paintings in person was astounding.  

Magritte's work and Surrealism as a movement feels very contemporary. His work questions our perceptions of reality. The world we currently live in can seem very surreal indeed. What was normal is no longer and truths and facts are questioned.

I chose to paint “La Decalcomanie” https://www.artsy.net/artwork/rene-magritte-la-decalcomanie, because I love Magritte's use of a man shown from behind with the hat. It is an image that is an icon in Magritte's work and an image I felt would work for my painting. 

In my museum paintings, I also ask the viewer to question what is going on with a cow in a museum and what is our perception of a museum experience and of a cow?  What is reality?  

In creating these paintings, the hardest part can be finding the cow or cows that can perform what I want to express.  I search through my database of images from my thirty-five years on the farm to find an image.  In this painting, I used two holstein cows as my models.  

Holstein cows are dairy cows and on our farm we raised beef cows.  We were novices at farming early on.  The cows on our farm were chosen for their beauty and looks as opposed to for their beef making ability.   Each cow was named and cherished with the best life we could imagine.  

For a gift, my husband bought 5 holstein calfs for our farm and for me to paint.  These were beautiful animals but they might as well have been giraffes.  Beef cattle and dairy cows do not socialize.  They did not recognize each other as part of the herd.  So after awhile we sold these cows.  But I did take many photos and used those images for inspiration for my painting.