‘ARE you going to send me a cow every Tuesday?’ asked supermodel Emily Ratajkowski of her father, after he sent two cow drawings to her, two Tuesdays in a row, from West Cork.
‘Why not?’ was her father John’s reply, and so he did.
Her father, artist John, who has a home in Bantry, had started out to do drawings of the Irish landscape.
‘But everywhere I went to draw landscape, there was a cow,’ he told a packed tea rooms at Bantry House this morning, at an event which was part of the West Cork Literary Festival.
John, a life-long artist, said he became a bit obsessed by cows when he started turning his first few drawings into a bigger project – to document Irish cows around the West Cork countryside.
‘I became a bit addicted,’ he admitted, and said the publication of his book Cow Tuesday was he way of putting a stop to the obsession.
The publication of over 100 drawings of various Irish cows was the main focus of his conversation with Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre director Ann Davoren, in front an audience of art and literature enthusiasts.
‘It reminded me of life drawing,’ said Californian John, who has also had a long career in lecturing in art.
But he said the cows reacted slightly differently than human subjects, though he noted the similarity in drawing living creatures, rather than still lifes, or a landscape.
‘When I moved, the cows would move too! They were more interested in me than I was in them,’ he noted.
And he agreed that he felt he had made a good connection with the bovines. ‘I didn’t eat beef for months after. And if I go to your house, and you give me a hamburger, I’ll eat it, but I won’t eat it at home. I keep thinking I probably know this guy!’
He also joked how he was once described as ‘the cow guy’ when introduced to someone in Bantry. ‘That’s just a paragraph in my art story,’ he said of the cow project. ‘I’ll keep writing my story and the Irish cow is part of my story.’
He revealed he is currently in the middle of a series of portraits of West Cork residents, and has completed about 30, with about 40 more to go.
‘The list keeps growing,’ he smiled.
He explained how art is often a more accurate record of history than history itself, because artists paint what they see. ‘And I can look back at drawings I did 40 years ago and I can tell where I was.’
‘I told my daughter this,’ he said, referring to his model, author and actress daughter Emily, who regularly visits her parents in Bantry. ‘I told her to fall in love with something – I don’t mean a human, that’s biological and it’ll happen a thousand times, I mean something.’
For him, it was art.
He started his cow drawings by sending her one image from Bantry, one Tuesday. And another the week after. When she asked him ‘are you going to send me a cow every Tuesday?’, a great idea was born.
‘It became like an addiction. I had to stop going out every day and finding a cow. 200 cows is a lot of cows.’
