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".
As often happens, a client found a painting on my website that they liked, but it was sold. The next step is to contact me and commission something with the same flavor, and as I have taken tons of reference photos over the years, there is always a probable chance that I can come up with something you will love just as much.
In this case, the sold painting was "Cutting the Mustard", a painting of Hereford cattle in a landscape. I knew I had more photos that would carry this theme, so I scoured out the best one, and produced these two graphite studies which were the result of cropping the same photo two different ways:
My client chose this one directly above, Three Cows in a Field as the composition for their painting. Next step was to begin the painting, which is 24"x36".
I layed it out in charcoal first, then put a wash over it in complimentary colors to what the final colors will be and got the cows started: And on to the finished painting:
This painting was quite fun to do, the reference photograph had all greens, but my client wanted wheat colored grasses, so I really enjoyed putting in all of the gold and amber waves of grain. It blends so well with the Herefords while at the same time making them stand out. Just enough green scrubby trees to lead the eye in and down to the cows.
