It’s been over 50 years since Betty LaDuke has been on the University of Denver campus. Since she left DU as an art student in 1951, LaDuke has traveled to Mexico, Ecuador, Uganda, Zimbabwe, India, Vietnam, and a wealth of other nations across the world. In 2003, she began touring a myriad of countries with Heifer International, a humanitarian organization that trains people to care for livestock in order to create a self-reliant, renewable end to world hunger. It is from this work with Heifer International that LaDuke has drawn inspiration for her most recent collection of paintings entitled Dreaming Cows.
Now, in 2007, LaDuke has returned to DU to share her vibrant stories and her even more vibrant works of art. The Dreaming Cows exhibit, a series of colorful, fanciful acrylics depicting the relationships that people have with animals and nature, is currently on display in Driscoll Gallery, where it will remain until June 9.
The paintings are, in LaDuke’s words, “abstract and mythical.” Fluid lines and bright, bold colors depict the stylized figures of people from across the world – from Rwanda to Cambodia to Poland – caring for pigs, farming the land, and selling goods at market. Vivid shades of turquoise, orange, and lavender convey the joy and hope of the paintings, while graphic patterns and intricate landscape designs reflect the native cultures that inspired them.
In many of the paintings, objects blend into one another and morph into different forms, like an abstracted puzzle; landscapes become cow silhouettes that stand next to women that in turn frame images of plants and birds. In “Passing on the Gift”, which depicts a ceremony where the firstborn calf of a family’s heifer is given to another member of the community, the rope leading the calf becomes a “torch of hope” filled with leaves and birds as it floats out of the hand of the woman holding it.
This fluidity and connectedness is all a part of LaDuke’s desire to illustrate a combination of the past, present, and future in one image, and to “create images that symbolically portray people’s universal and basic survival link to their environment.” LaDuke also spoke of the spirituality of “Pacha Mama”, Mother Earth.
These themes of time and a relationship with the earth are indeed portrayed in almost all of LaDuke’s work. In another painting called “Spinning Dreams”, for example, a woman is holding a spool of yarn that weaves its way around the alpacas surrounding her on the canvas, showing the bond of human and nature.
“I love the idea of life flowing through life,” said LaDuke.
LaDuke herself was at the University on April 16 for the exhibit’s opening reception, where she presented a slideshow chronicling her career as an artist, and answered questions from the audience about her work. Dressed in a woven vest as colorful as her paintings and speaking with a hint of an accent from her Bronx childhood, LaDuke told stories of the friends she made in Africa, the animals she came to know in India, and the ways in which her love for Mexico influenced her style.
La Duke recounted one moment in 1955 in particular that served as a great inspiration for her art in the decades to come, when she observed a boy with his pet bird and the happiness it brought him in the dry Mexican desert.
“I fell in love with the concept of hope,” LaDuke said. “Joy comes in a lot of formats, it’s not always material wealth. It’s hopes and dreams that aren’t betrayed by life’s circumstances.”
This is the message that LaDuke sends with her paintings for Heifer International. It is also the message that she hopes Dreaming Cows will convey to the students at DU, the same university where she began her journey fifty-six years ago.
