As I was painting this protest of factory farming, I came across the poem, Saint Francis and the Sow. Immediately my heart sank into the gulf between, one the one side, touching an animal as sacred and with blessing and on the other, subjecting it to a life of imprisonment and torture. This gulf is so wide and deep: is it an irreparable divide that humans are capable of such abject cruelty and are so far from seeing all of life as sacred? It may be, as I discuss in a blog post, that one can’t exist without the other. Falling into the depths of this divide deepened the compassion with which I completed this painting — in particular, the eyes. I tried to mirror that compassion in the eyes of this calf.

The source photo for this was from an activist organization and it was taken from inside a factory farm. This calf was destined either for slaughter or to bear calf after calf — none of which she would get to nourish and tend. A perpetual state of milk production is maintained in these dairy cows for maximum yield while they are hooked up to milking machines.

It is a horror show. Real flesh and blood lives strapped into a mindless machine programmed for human greed.

These are blessed creatures and sacred. They are stardust as much as we humans are. When I was young, one could buy milk from a local rural farm. That was ended for our “safety,” and in fact was the same mindless engine that drives the milk factories. Whereas a local rural farmer might have guided a cow to the barn and gave her some proper attention before gratefully filling a bucket with milk. That farmer would also count on the cow’s mothering instinct to nurture a newborn calf.

At the exhibition, a man was looking at this painting. I said to him, “she’s sweet isn’t she?” He replied, “Yes, I suppose it is.” ‘It’ is the pronoun in the english language used for nature. It’s a way of depersonalizing nature so that we can exploit her. If we say mother nature, it makes sense to me to use the pronoun ‘her’ for the life with which she abounds. So I do.