Best known for her bovine renditions, with unique compositions and contemporary views, Denise has combined her love of animals and art in oil for the past 20 years.
Denise's focus for the past several years has been cows because "Cows make me smile. I seriously can't look at one and hold back a smile. I don't just see an animal, I see a personality, and that is what I am working to present in my paintings of cows." In 2006 Denise received a commission from the California Milk Advisory Board to paint their famous Happy Cows of the Real California Milk campaign. This led to becoming "The Official Happy Cow Artist", as seen on their website.
Her creative process begins with field work, taking reference photos. Cows being a favorite subject means "field work" can be taken literally, and involves careful stepping!
With a signature "painterly realism" style Denise breathes life
into her subjects, often bringing viewer comments of how "you could just reach out and touch them" and "I expect them to mooo".
News around here is my Husband's knee surgery went well and he is recovering nicely! It's kept the Rich Artist a little distracted having him around the house for the past couple of weeks, but he's back to work, (and so am I.)
These are on the back burner as I am working on two commissioned pieces seen in another post, but I wanted to put them up. The cow with the herding dog, I believe it's a border collie, is a pet cow of a local woman who teaches cutting. This guy came in as a youngster for practice, and walked right into her heart. Lucky for him, and for me, as I had the opportunity to take several excellent photo reference shots of him a while back. This is the first painting I'll be doing of him, there will be more, he's quite photogenic and giving Howard's Heifer a bit of competition as my favorite bovine model! This piece is 24x24. This is just a vine charcoal value lay in, although I really do like it just as it is, this will be an oil painting, just as soon as I get around to it. I love this composition, the title is "I herd you".
And one small piece in the wings, 6x12 oil on board, this one is just blocked in, and will be a looser style study. I love the shadows. Not the best lit photo, it's on my mantle waiting to be finished. I might do this on a very large scale in the future, I think this study is working.
