“The Blue Cow’s Nightmare” by Koldo Barroso

Have you ever wondered what cows dream about? This is the way I portrayed the nightmare of a stuffed cow. A scene that has to do with global warming and the terrible consequences of men’s abuse of nature. I know it may look weird at first sight but I will try to explain how all this developed.

I originally drew this illustration back in 1991, though I never really finished it. I recently recovered it from an old folder and decided it was time to get it finished and shown, so I completed the drawing and did a few corrections on the computer. The original pencil drawing is 35 x 32 cm.

The story of this piece stars in September 1989, during my first trip to United Kingdom. I was spending a few days in Brighton and my partner at the time and I decided to have a walk along the beach in the night. We were walking by the infamous Brighton Pier and we saw one of these machines with paws to catch stuffed animals. I never gamble or play these things, I think is a stupid way to waste your money. But this time, I saw the cutest stuffed animal ever amongst a mountain of bears. It was a little blue cow and she was looking at me with innocent eyes telling me: “Take me home”.

Detail of the Little Blue Cow

So I had to save her from jail and take her with me. I started spending one coin after the other and trying to grab her with these mechanical paws that never seem to catch a damn thing. After three tries, she was released! It was a very exciting moment. But it didn’t end so easily. Just after taking the Little Blue Cow out of the cage we found out there was also a brown bull, it was her boyfriend and she beg me to free him too. It broke my heart, so I couldn’t just go like that and we ended up spending 10 pounds on two little stuffed animals!

I liked so much the design of Little Blue Cow that I decided to do this illustration about her. After all it’s not the first time that a stuffed animal becomes protagonist of a story, let’s not forget that A. A. Milne wrote Winnie the Pooh stories after his son’s teddy bear. I wondered what this Little Blue Cow would dream of and I thought she would have nightmares about how men abuse nature. So I came up with this idea of the big cloud of smoke swallowing the sun.

Detail of the smoke

For the character of the smoke cloud, I got inspired by Goya’s painting “Saturn Devouring One of His Sons”. I saw this painting hanging on the wall at my godfather’s place when I was four and I got completely impressed by it. There’s an older version of this scene painted by Rubens in 1636 which supposedly inspired Goya for his.

The landscape was inspired by my family’s homeland, Orduña, in the Basque Country. I used a few sketches of the mountains that I had drawn there many years before. The house is a typical building from the area called “caserio”. My grandparents and ancestors used to live in a place like this. Cows, hills and “caserios” are some of the most popular elements in Basque culture. If you want to know more about it I suggest you to watch a Spanish movie directed by Julio Médem in 1992 called “Vacas” (Cows).

Detail of the “caserio”

When I look at this illustration it makes me think about for how long we’ve known about the terrible consequences of man’s abuse of the Earth. I remember talking about this subject with friends in the early 80’s after Peter Gabriel’s song “Here Comes the Flood” and it looked like science fiction but these catastrophes are happening today. I also wrote a song called “1000 Seasons Haiku” by 1996, along with my good friend Juan Carlos Samper, which talked about seeing images of earthquakes, floods, fires and droughts all over the world in the news. It is very sad to check how this is exactly what is going on today and stuffed blue cows must probably have the same kind of nightmares. I dream of the day their nightmares turn into beautiful dreams.