Cattle grazing in a sunny meadow

I always like looking at cattle grazing. Guernseys seem to be more interested in people. I can’t recall passing Guernseys without at least one cow appreciating a good scratch on the head. Other breeds seem more apprehensive or disinterested, and so it was with these Friesians in a meadow I found one sunny day walking part of the Greensand Way near Friday Street.

I like the way that nature sometimes frames a view, and that a painting of a natural frame is then framed itself. We frame everything in our lives, not just pictures. More than that there is the contrast between sun and shade, light and dark. Traditionally such contrast is seen as the divide between good and evil, which always strikes me as a facile philosophy. If you look at the dark areas of the painting you’ll see that life is there after all. If you stood in a different place (or if the sun were to be obscured by cloud) the dark areas would become brighter. In life, darkness reveals itself out of the glare of the righteous. And righteousness has a way of being so bright that things going on in the light become invisible.

You might also like this view of cattle in a water meadow or this scene of autumn light.