Woody Jackson, often know as the “Cowman” began painting my iconic Vermont Holsteins in 1972, after graduating from Middlebury College, where I found my calling in art and then in the love of Vermont and its landscape. My friends and I worked as hired hands for the local dairymen. I worked for Avery Carl and his son Waverly in Bridport, VT. Their farm sat on a small hill overlooking the wide expanse of the Champlain Valley with the magnificent Adirondack Mountains to the West. There were barns and silos on most rises among the colorful fields of corn, hay and alfalfa spread in front of me, as I raked hay back and forth on meadow. The cows were always in the scene, stealing it, their black and white abstractions in contrast to the saturated hues of green, gold and fiery red sunsets. Blurring ones eyes lightly, there was only the black and white patterns against all those charged colors.

Next stop the studio or rather my grandparent kitchen on Iron Mountain in Jackson , New Hampshire, where I retreated to create a body of paintings with which to apply to art school in NYC. I brought my Vermont cows with me, and the first painting had a Jersey and a Holstein in front of Mount Washington with the big dipper overhead in the night sky. After several years of traveling , working in the apple orchards around Middlebury and making prints in the College print studio, courtesy of Professor David Bumbeck, I had my first exhibit call “Cows” in April of 1974. They were cut zinc plate prints, that simplified and used flat planes of color to accentuate the black and white puzzles of cows.

Cut to 1983 Brooklyn , NY where I was living in a loft after receiving an MFA from Yale School of Art. I was on the verge of returning to Vermont for good, when I got a call from someone named Ben who wanted to use my cows for his ice cream company. The caller was Ben of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, and I created a bill board image and tee shirt design for them just as they were expanding out of state for the first time, to Maine. Since then they have become a world wide phenomenon and my cows have gone with them every where and maybe helped them become the international company they are today. At the same time I started marketing my images on tee shirts and then cards, cowlendars and many other products, wholesaling across the nation and having a mail order catalog too. At my peak in the early nineties, I had a staff of 25 and was generating almost 2 million dollars in sales. That was a long time ago.

Today, I am a one man operation working from home, creating mostly original oil and watercolor paintings, but still selling tee shirts, prints and cards and a few other items. My family of six children are mostly grown and out of the house with two remaining, almost ready to fly. Vermont is still as beautiful place to live and paint, and raise cows. The cows have been very, very good to me.