John Ratajkowski: 'Emily said send me a cow picture every Tuesday'
John Ratajkowski is taking part in West Cork Literary Festival. Picture: Holger Smyth
They may not be considered the most aesthetic creatures in the animal kingdom but for John Ratajkowski, there is something beguiling about bovines.
The American artist, who has a second home in Bantry, Co Cork, has a whole new appreciation for cows since he ventured out into the fields near his farmhouse and found the perfect subject.
“We were spending six months in Ireland and I needed to practise some drawing. I went out one day and there they were. I drew one cow, then I drew another one and another one. I sent a drawing to my daughter Emily on a Tuesday, and then, for no particular reason, the next Tuesday, and she said ‘send me one every Tuesday and we’ll call it Cow Tuesday’. So that’s where the idea came from. I wound up with over 200 drawings.”
The ‘Emily’ he refers to is the famous model, actress and writer, known to her fans and tens of millions of followers on social media as EmRata.
Not surprisingly given her promotional nous, the Cow Tuesday went viral when posted online, and a selection of the drawings have now been collected in a book of the same name, which Ratajkowski will discuss at the West Cork Literary Festival in his adopted home town of Bantry.
Irish people are so accustomed to seeing herds of cows roaming in our countryside, perhaps we don’t appreciate their particular charms.
“Yes, West Cork is the land of the cow, and I took them for granted too. They are wonderful animals, they’re beautiful. They’re also the best models in the world — they would stand in front of me and pose as long as I needed them to be there. I would go to an open field and one would pop up, then another one, and little by little, the herd would come to me and just stand there.”
Ratajkowski is a multi-disciplinary artist who has exhibited his work in Dublin, Galway and at the Crawford Gallery in Cork. He first visited Bantry in the late 1980s and felt an immediate connection with the town and surrounding area. He ended up buying a farmhouse, where he and his wife Kathleen Balgley, a writer and former English professor, usually spend the summer and autumn, before returning to their home in sunny San Diego in the winter.
“A friend of a friend had a house in Bantry and I was doing an art show in Ireland; I thought I would go there for a few months and paint. I went to Bantry and I absolutely fell in love with the place. I was going to stay two months and I stayed two years.”
The artist ended up playing on the Bantry Blues basketball team, which he now sponsors along with his daughter and a friend. “I got connected through community and that was all it took,” he says.
Ratajkowski taught art in California for many years — his students included film producer Jonathan Wang, who recently won an Oscar for the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. At one point, he even taught his daughter Emily, who majored in art at UCLA.
Given Emily's own creative talents, she obviously serves as a sounding board for her father as well as an enthusiastic supporter of his work, promoting the Cow Tuesday book to her 29 million Instagram followers. He says that while the connection means more people see his work, his priority is to protect his relationship with his daughter.
“Having the same name as Emily has been good and bad. I obviously get a lot of people that can’t get to her. I get calls from galleries saying ‘we would like to show your work if your daughter shows hers’. I’m not doing that. I’m not going to exploit her. I want to just be her father and that’s it.”
In his most recent visits to Ireland, Ratajkowski has been working on a project where he interviews different people from the Irish artistic community on film, then does portraits of them. He finds that Irish people love to hear the stories behind his art.
“They are interested in what brings you to it and why you do it. They listen to stories, they tell stories, they read stories, it is deep in the culture, it really is. When they start a conversation, it is not out of politeness, they are genuinely curious about what you have to say, you don’t get that everywhere.”
And what do the locals in Bantry make of his cow drawings? “They think I’m insane,” he laughs. “Now that I’m doing the portraits, they are realising that I do have an idea of what I’m doing. I was there a year before anyone knew I was even an artist, I just kind of kept that to myself. The interesting thing about [being in] west Cork, as curious as the people are, they don’t pry. They’re not big into your life, they’ll take what you have to give them. I found that very interesting.”
It is a quality that is particularly appreciated by his famous daughter, who growing up, spent all of her summers in Bantry and still returns when she can.
“They protect her privacy like she is one of them. When she goes to town, people are nice and they know who she is, but it’s not like in the US, with autographs and pictures. Graham Norton is down here, I run into him all the time and people don’t bother him either. Same with Jeremy Irons. It is a place where you can kind of disappear. When you see someone approach Jeremy Irons in the street, it’s probably an American.”
- John Ratajkowski will be in Bantry House Tearooms on Friday, Jul 14 at 10am for a coffee and a chat as part of the West Cork Literary Festival, which runs from Jul 7 to 14. Bantry Library will also host an exhibition of some of his drawings from Cow Tuesday. www.westcorkliteraryfestival.ie
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