Emily Rutland was born in 1890 in Lee County, Texas. In the 1920s, she studied at the San Antonio Art School under the tutelage of the Spanish born American painter Xavier Gonzalez. She also received formal training at what is now Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Rutland is best known today for her scenes of farm life, which she executed in a variety of mediums. She exhibited widely throughout her career and was a founding member of the South Texas Art League. Rutland’s art now belongs in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the McNay Art Museum, and the Witte Memorial Museum.

Rutland’s Cows Abstracted is aptly titled. With short, choppy strokes, Rutland constructs a mosaic-like scene of cattle. Moody and dark, this energetic Cubist-leaning abstraction fragments color and form to achieve an elemental and emotive rendering of two cows. The frames of the cows, as well as their flesh and muscle, are outlined heavily. Rutland uses bold lines and dramatic shading strategically to order the chaotic colors and produce an intelligible image. While her simplification of form is abstractionist orthodoxy à la Xavier Gonzalez, Rutland’s treatment of light and shadow is unconventional and unique. Rutland shows the cattle illuminated, almost glowing. Rutland marries her experience of nature, its sunlight and fauna, with her own ideas and meanings to produce a work simultaneously representational and imaginative, real and surreal.