Cows on the Loose A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

One of the pleasures of art is its capacity to transform the common, or better, what we associate with the common into something richly suggestive and nuanced, finding ourselves capable of surprise.

Cows come to mind.

The subject of cows, or cowness, if you will, is the contemplation of Lincoln artist Nadine McHenry. In a recent exhibition at the Museum of Nebraska Art titled, appropriately, Cows on the Loose. Cows with energy, nobility, and an amiable harmony with the landscape populate her canvases.

Shape, color and brushstrokes convey an ancient understanding of nature in its inter-relatedness. Why those churning, roiling cloud banks on the horizon have the hefty swell of the rump of a cow don't they? They quiver and dance to that constant prairie piper, the wind. We are caught up in the exhilarating materials of the sandhills-sky, land and cow surging in contentment.

In the painting Winter Pasture, like the repeating base line of a musical canon, the color of deep, rich clay fuses together the image of a small kine of Herefords with the landscape around them-those succulent daubs of ochre, green orange and blue paint merge and move to McHenry's rhythmic brushstrokes, strokes with uncanny qualities: so various, so seemingly chance in their occupations on the paintings' surface-their soft focus melding and highlighting colors into fresh understandings, appreciations of sandhills coloration's.

In the embrace of these bold, energetic brushstrokes cows shed the citified myths of placid bovinity. In the painting Hoofin' It, bold strokes of blue and turquoise on the back of the cow propel her determined forward movement, the white highlights on her high stepping right foreleg give further bounce and energy to the image.

Large, thick brushstrokes embolden the disconcerting stare of the Contrapposto Cow in the painting of that name. Shades of Velasquez! The cow stares at us with layers of personality, with a look so knowing, so wise, so serene, are we perhaps in the sacred presence of a sandhills Buddha?