Steve laughs and looks through pictures of my other visits for evidence. If the book were up to date, her markings on both her sides and on her head would have been sketched in. Each page has these generic outlines of a cow. There is a lightly printed grid to help recreate the shapes. The cows that have been entered in the book haven't been finished.
Lines squiggle around but no blocks of black.
When I see this, the colorer in me wants to fill in, turn a pencil on its side and make the broad flat shading strokes. I want to outline, define. The markings of these animals are abstract and are abstractly the embodiment of the vacuum. It is as if the huge sides of these creatures are chalkboards for this lesson. The world of the farm is reduced to this binary instruction.