“Devon Diva” was the direct result of a visit to Cotswold Farm Park. Adam Henson, of TV’s Countryfile, created this park to preserve, and educate the public about the need to preserve, many of the UK’s vanishing heritage livestock. I have done a lot of work to help conserve wild animals and habitat, and as a gardening aficionado have long been aware of the dangers of monoculture and the need to preserve heritage seed strains, but I’d never given the same amount of thought to livestock. Fortunately, Cotswold Farm Park was there to educate me. I spent many hours photographing the many old and unusual breeds they maintain at the park, but this Large Black Sow, also known as a Devon, stole the show. Her massive litter of adorable little piglets were wonderfully entertaining, but I loved watching the big sow move and was obsessed with conveying the sense of her ponderous mass in this painting.

“Devon Diva” is part of my pattern series, in which I reduce the subject to a silhouetted, stamp-like form, and repeat that shape to create a background pattern, pitting the animal against a mass-produced image of itself. In most cases, the effect is humorous, evoking the animal’s ubiquity, life cycle, or reproductive capacity. With the inescapable pop art references, one is reminded of Andy Warhol’s soup cans or Wayne Theibauld’s regimented displays of puddings. In all cases, this systematization of a natural shape highlights the significance of the animal in human life and culture. Certainly commercial food production is the story in this case.