Forms of Quiet Strength: Painting the Cow Series
Symbolic works that explore the quiet strength and timeless stillness of rural life.
Animals have long been part of my experience living in rural Vermont. From the studio, I often see them in the meadows and beyond the stone walls—sometimes near enough, other times distant figures moving through mist and light. Cows, especially, have an extraordinary stillness. Years ago, a farmer’s herd pastured our meadows. Cows possess a quiet gravity, as if they belong to another pattern of time. On our hill they are no longer seen and seeing them is becoming increasingly rare as dairy farms continue to disappear, yet I occasionally glimpse them in fields while driving the backroads.
The Cow Paintings emerged from that observation—not from life sketches, but from an idea, from memory, imagination, and creative process. I wasn’t interested in depicting a particular animal or breed, but rather in exploring their presence as form and symbol. In painting them, I found myself drawn to reduction—to simplicity of gesture, to balance, to what remains when everything unnecessary has been set aside.
Each of these paintings combines several techniques: drawing with oil stick, pressing cut paper shapes in monotype, and brushing thin layers of color that are later rubbed, scraped, and reworked. The process is one of constant discovery, where accidents become revelations and chance is allowed to speak. The surfaces carry traces of both immediacy and endurance, echoing the landscapes in which these animals quietly exist.
The compositions are intentionally primitive—almost childlike. But I think of them as closer to ancient or Nordic imagery, where symbolic form transcends realism. In Untitled (Two Pink Cows), for instance, a coral outline becomes both structure and aura. The cloud hovering above is not weather, but presence—a companion to the animals below.
This series, like the earlier bird paintings, connects gesture and stillness, motion and calm. Both are, in a sense, about the same pursuit: to find an essential form that feels inevitable and familiar.
A reflection by Vermont artist Glenn Suokko on painting animals as symbolic figures—exploring simplicity, Nordic imagery, and the quiet balance between structure and spontaneity. Read more Reflections >
