Plein Air Oil Sketch: Grazing in the Morning (11 x 16)

It is really a quick sketch. With animals I usually skip using sienna to compose at the beginning because they are so mobile. I simply think how many of them I need to include in my picture and compose in my mind how they each poses. So this morning I immediately blocked in color masses as soon as I set up. I had to rush. Today's painting is one of my quickest. Those animals allowed me not even 15 minutes and they disappeared in the shade of the woods. What I embellished later totally came from my memory. I always take a timer with me when I paint plein air. Most of my best works were done in a rush. It makes sense because you have to follow your instinct to prioritize everything in your process and that forces you to leave out the less important details. This way you easily achieve one of the most important things in painting --simplification. And your work will be really authentic.

I usually set a half hour to remind myself to hurry. Today it was done even before the second half hour was over. I love the red brown cows in the sun. I love painting cows as much as I do horses. When I was little, I seldom ate beef because my mother believed humans should not eat their meat after cows tilled the land for us all their lives. At that time beef was from cows butchered when they were too old to work in the field. Chinese have the so-called cow spirit, that is, being hard-working and tolerant.

Usually I avoid political topics in my blog. Today I need to express my support for the pro-democracy students' movement in Hong Kong for rights to genuine direct election of government officials. 25 years ago, a similar pro-democratic students' movement happened in Beijing. As a result, hundreds of people were butchered in Tiananman Square Massacre. As a student studying in this country at that time, I became an American by choice. The Chinese Communist government claims that China is a country with special character and that Chinese have already had democracy which is even better than Western democracy. Since we are on the topic of cows and I have a very good picture to illustrate what Chinese democracy is. See it yourself.