French Cows are so Chic

French Cows are so Chic (my working title for now)

30" x 40" - acrylic on canvas - $600

A number of years ago I painted the landscape below and at the time I was quite happy with it. Over the years, however, I kept looking at those fleshy-coloured trees and wondered if I could improve upon their colour. I loved the lower half of the painting, basically a blue-purple abstract. But not those trees.

Try as I might, I could not come up with a better colour for those trees and a month ago I decide to just paint them out, and then see what happens......

The trees are gone, and colour has been intensified. Is this going to be a big non-objective painting, or an abstracted landscape? 

Not sure, kept painting.

Created some larger shapes. Still liking lots of different areas, but still unsure where it was going.

At this point I considered turning the whole composition into a highly stylized and abstracted 'still life', or 'figure', or 'animal',  by drawing their outline on the surface of the canvas and then painting out the negative space (which would then produce the positive shape). 

Thinking about animals, I thought of cows (which I have painted in the past) and found a great photo, taken on a trip to Brittany in 2017, of a group of curious holsteins. At the time these gals saw me at a distance and marched over to where the car was parked next to on the side of a country road. Fortunately there was also a fence separating us.  

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Why not create a cow painting.....and that idea led to this, and finally the finished painting at the top of the post.

Good decision I think, all around, good challenge and fun painting