After the July juju sale, I saw that this painting was torn at the top. Each month, there are various damages I find – jewelry with stones missing, chipped glass, broken pottery. Often they are hidden under something.
Or possibly they were just knocked off and rolled underneath? I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt, it’s easy to break fragile items in a crowded space.
In the case of this cow, I know how it must’ve happened. I clip the paintings to a string with a clothespin and the wooden pin probably just tore the paper when someone took it down to look at it.
Luckily, it was an easy fix, I still had more pages in the chapter of the book I’d used to paint this. The heading at the top of the page is “Old England” which might not really seem right for a cattle picture, but this is a Guernsey cow and her breed is from Britain.
I try to make the heading relate to the art. Often it’s the words that inspire the work, but often, it’s kinda generic. Like using a book about nature to paint any type of animal I want. Or this geography book with a chapter on England to paint a gurnsey.
For this, I scraped off the raggedy bits of paper, and tore off a matching scrap from a new page, glued it down, let it dry, and repainted it to match the background. It’s not perfect, but if you don’t inspect too closely, it worked.
But the biggest problem with my painting? I thought cows would be a good fit for Kansas City. Which, yes, it is an ideal subject. So… why did I think an English title would be better than using a page about prairies, the west, or something actually about Kansas or Missouri? Hmm, just bad marketing, huh?