In the summer of 2000, I happened to be in New York City. Everywhere we went, there were cows! I was fascinated and photographed as many as I could. As an artist, I really wanted to create a cow! This year, the Cow Parade is coming to Raleigh and the Triangle. http://cowparadenc.com/
My studio mate, Lee Ball, and I heard about the cows and spent an afternoon brainstorming designs; we came up with 4 pretty good ideas and submitted them. Time went by without word and another call for artists came out – we got industrious and submitted 12 more. Of the 16 submitted, we were awarded a cow – Wi-Fi Cowspot!
The story behind the design – In December I was out Christmas shopping at REI and overheard a sales pitch for a portable solar panel to carry hiking so you would always be connected. This is probably a great safety measure but it struck me as funny. I go hiking to get away from it all; taking it with me seems to defeat the purpose.
The second call for cow designs mentioned a marketing company’s desire to have something innovative, not just a painting and since we wanted to do structural things to a cow, we focused on computer and networking oriented designs. Having a solar panel would allow Bessie to stay connected while she was out in the field – that was just the beginning! The design incorporates a CPU to feed the brain and the solar panel to keep the brain running.
We picked up our cow one Saturday. Lee’s father drove us in his truck with a nice trailer to haul a cow. The
cows were wrapped in bubble wrap with card board fitted to protect the face and tail. For some reason they reminded me of Egyptian art. Luckily the cows only weigh around 120 lbs so we can lift her easily. The drive home was uneventful thank goodness! Our original plan was to board her on Lee’s parent’s farm. She looks pretty good heading into the barn. The farm ended up being too far away for our work schedule, it’s so hot and the storms curtail working on her, so we moved her to Cary. The work began once she arrived in Cary.
Taking the bubble wrap off was awesome! She’s beautiful! The first thing we did was paint her with a coat of primer and then drew on the spots. The work was going to mess up the paint job but painting her was our first priority. We researched dairy cows to pick up on the nuances of their coats. It was a tough decision: paint her realistically or paint her as a network of shapes. Shapes seemed to be in keeping with the subject matter. Once we got her spots painted she came to life!
Painting the nose and mouth and the utter set us up for the technical design implementation. The first step in applying the design was to mark out the area for the monitors. We had monitors to use for Bessie but it became apparent that taking a monitor apart to use for our purposes wasn’t the best idea. Boxes with Plexiglas seem much more practical.
Here’s Bessie prepped for surgery and the final moments of the removal.
You can see the grid drawn out on Bessie’s right shoulder above. There are 4 grids which will be used for the word search puzzles. Two 10x10s and two 12x12s – that’s 488 holes! I’d never used an electric drill before; they look easy to use and since they’re electric, seemed pretty effortless… 488 hole in a fiberglass cow is work!!
It took me 3 evenings to drill all those hole. After the first day, my hands and shoulder were so sore, it was slow going. The first grid has a few out- of-sink holes, then I got the bright idea to draw the grid out. Positioning was pretty easy once they were drawn; drawing them was a challenge since Bessie is such a curvaceous bovine.
While I was drilling holes, Lee was shaping the CPU to fit Bessie’s neck. That had also seemed like a straight forward task! Lee used a Dremel tool to cut with. It took 2 1/2 packages of discs to make the first cut. CPU cases are double layers that are extremely tough! The final fitting took metal shears and some pounding and then some more Dremel-ing. The box is held into place with epoxy and is being shaped to blend into her neck with Bondo. She will forever be burdened with extra memory.
Her horns are wrapped with stereo wire. Wires are one of those unavoidable components of our technological age so they will be an integral part of her design. The wire on the horns adds color and texture; it’s hard to keep from rubbing them. We are planning to have wire as a part of the design of her tail and to also have her tangled in wire, we’ll see! If you look at her left shoulder, you can see the keyboard keys inset into all those holes I drilled!
Once again our methods were challenged. The plan was to use stamps to apply the letters to the keys for the word search puzzles. Paint and uneven surfaces don’t work well with stamps! I’d spent 2 days watching instructional videos on typography; I was primed to draw letters! Lee couldn’t work directly on the cow while I worked on the lettering, any movement and I had to wipe off and start over! She built the second monitor box and fed her children while I did the first 2 puzzles. She will finish the sanding and Bondoing while I am at work so that we can both be painting tonight.
A word about the Word Search Puzzles.
Choosing a topic for the puzzles was a bit overwhelming at first. There are so many things to draw from. Technology seemed like the place to start but that turned out to be rather boring. We settled on the Triangle as our first parameter. I started looking at street names. I got maps of the Triangle from AAA and spent the better part of 2 days going through all the names and picking out names that seemed to fit into nice categories. Street names range from numbers to the generic Main or Broad St. They are named after people, trees, plants, birds, and animals. They are also named after far away lands, alcohol, and artillery. I decided to group the names into categories that had something to do with North Carolina and the Triangle and then names that were just plain out fun. We have 4 puzzles: RTP, Just for Fun, Just for Kids, and Famous People. The words will be listed on the monitor screens and the solutions will be in the Moooepedia that Bessie is reading.
You can come and see all the cows in the Cow Parade on August 18th, see the invitation: http://cowparadenc.com/wp-content/uploads/RoundUpInvite-lr.pdf
Check back for updates, it will be a busy few weeks, we have a Sock Monkey Cow to do after this one is finished!
