Merino Trio Painting

I love the look of these three characters - Merino rams. I have observed in horror the rapid conversion of intergenerational sheep farms into intensely over-stocked dairy farms, especially in the Canterbury area of the South Island, New Zealand. Once this area was a naturally arid open beautiful landscape, which used to be populated by fluffy white sheep. Now with nearly the whole area converted into dairy cow farms along with their usual ugly clutter: sheds, silos, effluent ponds, and massive steel irrigators wheeling across the paddocks. This recent dairy conversion boom has now gone bust. The dairy farmers have left in their wake polluted rivers, which actually ran dry with fishermen left struggling to save the fish. Also run off pollution has caused algae blooms to poison many of the fish and contaminate rivers. In the rush to make as much money as possible from the ‘white gold’ and their newly installed irrigation systems nothing has been left untouched by the filth, even ground water has been contaminated. This gluttonous greed of cow exploiting has left ugly houses with no landscaping just plonked in the middle of paddocks for the equally exploited Philippine workers hired especially as cheap labor. Now that this hideous (milk) bubble has reached a world glut, I hope this ugly chapter that reaches all the way to the corrupt halls of our parliament is over. The land at least can be cleaned up and used sustainably, and just maybe the picturesque sheep farms will return? Maybe even the beautiful old tree shelterbelt hedges that used to be a distinctive feature of the Canterbury plains will also be replanted. The destroying of those ancient tree shelters so that massive irrigators can move unimpeded over huge areas of land has now allowed strong winds to blow unobstructed over the plains uprooting any remaining trees. Shortsighted greed has turned this area into a ‘Mordor’ dairy hell. This is a small series of nearly lost NZ culture in the reckless pursuit of money at any cost. The dairy nightmare has reaped what it has sown - crap. * This painting has multilayers of acrylic paint on canvas making this work highly textural, finished with a quality varnish for a protective finish. The canvas is stretched over professionally made wooden stretcher bars, the painting is ready to hang.

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:16.1 W x 12.2 H x 1.2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.