cow maps and map falls

After reading that it takes 1,860 gallons of water to produce one pound of edible beef, I started painting cows from a series of photographs I had taken at a county fair. As I made studies, the lineup of black and white Holstein cows began to look like a map, and as I kept painting, a high horizon line emerged.

This lead me to think of them as “Map Falls”—meaning that the map is changing and it looked like water was “falling” over the edge of the earth. It made me think of water from glacier melting, pouring into the oceans and changing the shape of every coast line with higher sea levels. The most recent paintings are called “Global Warming, Global Melt”, some showing the world as we know it and others anticipate a global map that is unrecognizable.