CHOCOLATE BOX ART.

The term chocolate box when referring to a painting is perhaps the harshest of all critical put downs. However even Van Goff’s work has appeared on confectionary box covers as well as being transformed into jigsaw puzzles and deformed into paint by number kits. I somehow think those who pay tens of millions of pounds for his work would not appreciate their prized possession being referred to as chocolate boxy.

Thirty years ago my first exhibition proved a sell-out show featuring mainly Breton dairy cows. I made up my mind there and then to stop painting cows fearing I might become known simply as a cow painter. Twenty years on people continued to ask me was I still painting cows, so now I figure if you can’t beat them then you might as well give them what they want. Last summer I was intrigued to see in a Scottish Art Gallery window a large painting of a highland cows head. The poor beast had been coiffured about the fringe so as to reveal two sad staring eyes. In reality this never happens unless a sudden gust of wind flicks the facial top not to one side. Then on looking further into the gallery I spotted another head or rather half a head, which had the added bonus that the artist did not need to reproduce a perfect matching pair of horns. As well as varying in colour from black to blond the most common being ginger, highland cows horns can also vary considerably from horizontal when young to a magnificent handlebar pair. 

This unfortunate deformed beast with one horn growing up while the other turns down was spotted on North Uist and as such would not have passed the beauty criteria for being a suitable artist model. I ventured into the gallery for a closer look and overheard the gallery attendant on the phone clinching the deal for the head in the window at £900 to a German tourist. Wow I thought, I must get me some of that chocolate.

And so over the next few summers I stopped whenever possible to study the great lumbering beast. Either they are incredibly dim in their slow trudging gait and reluctance to stray from their intended pathway along single track roads and oncoming traffic, or they house some serious intelligence within that shaggy head as they turn slowly knowing that their plodding pace of life holds far more depth than the scurrying humans intent on getting a photo from the car window. As the summer season drew to a close I returned to the easel with my sketches and found enjoyment in giving life to some fine specimens.