Holy Cow!

One of the very nice features of the post-60’s world is the reintroduction of folk art into our lives. I’ve written previously about Patrick Amiot of Sebastopol, California (June 15, 2008), who has peopled that area with wondrously fantastic metal sculptures, and about Axil Stenzel of Roberts Creek, B.C. (June 23, 2008), who has peopled his yard with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of strange metal beings. Those who make the trek down the I-5 to California from up here have doubtless seen Ralph Starritt’s rusty cow sculpture to the east of the highway near Yreka in an endless stubble field. It is a life-size cow of welded sheet metal named ‘MooDonna,’ and it’s been in that field for well over a decade.

Down in Sebastopol, Patrick Amiot also has a semi-realistic metal cow sculpture (in addition to his fantasy creatures) that lives in a field populated by real Holsteins. According to the San Francisco Examiner, ‘At dusk, the live cows congregate around the artwork and use it as a scratching post, frequently moving it a few feet a day. Amiot has worried that they might knock over his creation. Which would probably be a first: a cow-tipping with cows as the perpetrators.’

If you google ‘metal cow sculptures,’ you will find that there a lot of them in the U.K., so it’s not just a U.S. thing. But now, Point Roberts has joined all these other excellent towns in having its own metal cow sculpture. [Correction: A reader points out that this cow (referred to as a 'lawn cow') is more likely to be fiberglass or resin than metal.] On the south side of Benson Road, just before you get to the admirable Aydon Wellness Clinic, there is DREWHENGE, where the homeowner and patenter of some kind of interlocking blocks has interlocked them to create an impressively large arch over his entranceway. On the large, grassy field that constitutes Drewhenge’s front yard, stands the cow in the photo above. You can’t always see the cow right from the road as you drive by because the cow moves around. Not under its own momentum, of course: it's a metal sculpture. Nevertheless, one can only hope that, someday, the Drewhenge cow meets up with the Point Roberts’ Marina's cows. I have, of course, no real understanding of why the marina has cattle, but maybe they’re folk art, too, even though they do move on their own and are eventually headed for an abattoir.