Nancy Doyle Fine Art
This reproduction is of an original oil, Cows and Pond, of a local farm scene. Many years ago in a New York gallery, I saw a large landscape with cows in front of a pond, by the painter Rackstraw Downes. In his painting, the cows and pond took up only about the bottom 10% of the canvas; the rest was a sky full of perfectly realized clouds. His technical skill in this image amazed me, and the colors and shapes of the cows against the surrounding landscape and pond struck me. At the time I was only recently out of art school, and didn't have the skill to create such a perfect image, which haunted me until almost 20 years later, when I was finally able to create such an image myself - not exactly like his, but my own version of it. The color violet was not really used by painters until the Impressionists came along; it is a useful color for a painter, as it sets up many vibrant color relationships in the image.
