the barnyard

Looking back, I think I started a barnyard series without realizing it. Many more of my etegami besides the ones posted here were inspired by farm animals. There's something comforting about these creatures. I don't know why that would be. I wasn't raised on a farm. But I think I would have liked it.

During my high school years, I worked as a volunteer for two weeks out of each summer on small dairy farms in southern Hokkaido. Unskilled, and stupid-but-eager, high school students like myself volunteered their labor to help struggling farmers start from scratch, beginning with the burning off of stubborn and ungrazeable bamboo grass to make way for grass and hay.

When the time came to harvest the hay, we did everything by hand and horse-drawn truck bed. None of the young farmers could afford machinery back then. And the wilderness they were converting to pasture land was all hills, steep enough that machines couldn't have climbed the slopes anyway. The main industry in the area was fisheries, and the coastal hills had never been cultivated.

Hokkaido is famous for the wide open plains that farmers in Japan's main islands drool over, and it didn't make sense for this first wave of graduates from the Dairy College near Sapporo to choose this impossibly hilly part of the prefecture for establishing a foothold. Well, they had their reasons, which I won't go into here. And they were reasons that I believed in, which was why I was there.

The etegami are displayed in my most recent hand-painted frames. The etegami are also for sale.

proverbial cows

Here is a series of etegami based on cow-related proverbs. Some may be familiar to you, others less so. Since cow faces featured prominently in Issa's cows, I tried to refer to the cow a little more indirectly this time. The one posted here at the top quotes an African proverb. I don't know which tribal group or language culture, but it obviously comes from one which values cow dung for its usefulness in daily life. I wasn't trying to be gross or anything. (Those black marks are cow hoof prints, by the way!)

Of the etegami and etegami collages shown below, the only one that doesn't come with English writing is the Japanese proverb that reads: Tsuno o tamete, Ushi o korosu, which translates roughly to: Killing the cow while trying to straighten its horn. It has a similar meaning to the English saying "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." (obsessing over minor things and screwing up something major).




I think I'm finished with cows for a while. But I would be thrilled if any of you want to send me your own hand-painted etegami or other mailart based on a cow proverb, song, or poem from your own culture. :D

issa's cows

Haiku inspires many of my etegami. The poems of Matsuo Basho are favorites of mine. But he doesn't mention cows very much, and after my recent purple cow post, I was itching to draw more cows. You know who mentions cows time and time again? The haiku poet Kobayashi Issa. This fact was recently brought to my attention by @Cow Lady when she sent me this link. I took up the challenge and, although I didn't necessarily use the translations provided on that page, I tried my hand at illustrating some of Issa's cow haiku with etegami collages.




In my next post, I'll show you some etegami I did that were inspired by cow proverbs. heh heh. Can you tell I'm having fun?