The cow drawings are done from photographs. My first group of images were great, brilliant even, but I realized I could do better. The photos alone, in this case, were inadequate; I needed to better understand what I was seeing in the photographs. I spent a large part of the next summer in the pasture sketching cattle, learning to understand exactly what every curve and bulge in a cow’s hide meant in terms of how they were put together underneath. I drew their hooves over and over.

When I went back to the heifer series, I also decided to remove all traces of background, even the shadows underneath. I used toned paper, and made those tones function as the shadows on the white areas and highlights on the black spots. I wanted to see how much I could reduce the image and still convey a sense of a tight and realistic drawing of a cow, bringing to them a sense of solidity and weight, despite an almost minimalist style.