Matthew Teitelbaum and Peter White, “Joe Fafard: Cows and Other Luminaries 1977-1987”, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon and Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, 1987, pages 15-16
Speaking of Joe Fafard's “addiction” to the representation of cattle, Peter White notes that the beasts have been a regular focus throughout the artist's career, a familiar subject represented in his varied two and three-dimensional works of art. Citing Fafard's anxiety when attempting to part from depicting cows, bulls and calves, White provides this uptight reaction as Fafard's “compulsion to the artistic process.” “Fafard's familiarity with cows goes back to childhood. When he was growing up on a family farm in Ste. Marthe, Saskatchewan, near the Manitoba border, cows were a fixture of his life.” Tying together this early cohabitation with the animals to his later accurate recreation of their essence, Fafard recalled, “I have spent much of my life working for cows, after awhile you don't know who is using whom.”
The artist believes that this work may have been executed during his time in California.
