At the end of the day, I did grow up on a farm. When I say farm, I don't mean farm like on Dallas or a farm with a name like "big double acres" farm. I mean a fairly standard eastern Kentucky farm with several acres of mostly loose barbed wire fences, a few out buildings constructed out of non-matching materials and about 9 cows. It was larger when I was a kid and my dad had a tobacco base but he sold a few pieces and so on. We had a pond in the cow field that at one time had been the runoff for a laundry mat and car wash operation that my dad built on a country road in the middle of nowhere. That is another story. The pond had so much algae, that it looked like green 70's shag carpet that rippled and rolled as one large connected mat. On hot summer days the cows would lumber out into that moat making openings that gradually seemed back together behind them. They would stand there in that awful stuff, cooling and drinking with green flock hanging on their faces.
On one particular occasion, I looked down at the pond and three almost identical cows stood, looking at me, evenly spaced in the foam with empty eyes, quiet, still and resigned somehow. I have made many paintings with this image in mind. I took a picture but when I paint this image, I simply paint my idea about it at the time.
I started painting cows because I wanted to make a painting that my dad, who was intelligent but not educated with no background in art whatsoever, could have an entry into. A recognizable key in a way into the broader and much more complicated ideas that I explore in these paintings. As for the question regarding my family's reaction to my choice to become an artist, it seems like so long ago that I decided that but I guess it hasn't been. My wife and I will have been married for 15 years this August and she encouraged my decision when she was my girlfriend and I don't think we have ever re-considered at all. As for my parents, I think I remember something like, "well, whatever you want to do."
I would like to conclude this post with a catalog intro written by Travis Townsend (excellent friend and art collaborator) who talks in an interesting way about my cow paintings and also about "Three Cows in a Pond" which all of the above paintings are titled.
"Mimickingthe shape of the background treeless hills and employing a palette of meatypinks, reds, and browns, three large blind cows in dramatic shadow marchbriskly and ungainly across the canvas from left to right into a vaguelydescribed pool of grayish-blue water. Another set of three cows, up to their shoulders in the distant stagnantmuck, sit unmoving, side by side by side.
Smith’spowerfully emotive subjects appear still and singular or in groups that are inthe middle of some habitual migration. Sometimes limbless, and often heavily textured, the representationalimages abstract and disintegrate awkwardly into their surroundings orexpressively appear in illogical combinations of udder, face, and flank. Scraped and pathetic, drippy and flat, thesecows, and in recent works, birds, and men move through their world toward adistant and unrecognizable goal. Theyare, of course, stand-ins for humanity as we traipse here and there on daily(or life-long) quests to find food, sex, shelter, or freedom. Should we be depressed or empowered by thisrealization?
BrandonC. Smith’s uncomfortably epic paintings uniquely undermine iconic images ofanimal and land. It is this tension thatpropels these perplexing works and keeps them at the forefront of one’sconsideration." -TravisTownsend
Check out some of Travis's work here.
Don't forget to check out Peggy's response to this same question. Also note that Peggy's website is now: www.Peggycoots.com then click on Blog