The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
MILKING METHOD
Coginchaug senior’s project reintroduces youngsters to the art of dairy farming
DURHAM » Perhaps never before has a bovine’s lower limbs been compared to the gams of the 1930s and ’40s actress and dancer best known for her million dollar legs.
That’s exactly the first thing that came to mind for Durham Fair education coordinator Emily Annino when Coginchaug High School senior Adriana Wimler unveiled her stunningly lifelike sculpture of a cow. Annino “commissioned” the paper mache animal after she asked visual art teacher Ryan Bothamley if he had a student who might be capable of creating an object that would demonstrate to children how to milk a dairy cow.
Wimler, 17, who grew up on Wimler’s Farm in town, took on the seemingly unwieldy project just as she does with anything she puts her mind to, said admirers. “The first thing that was completed was the frame and the legs and I said, ‘she has Betty Grabel legs.’ She’s supposed to have the most beautiful legs and it just got better from then on.
“It’s going to knock your socks off,” Annino said of the
sculpture, which is about a sturdy as, well, a cow — and sits on a wheeled platform so it can be moved about.
The teen spent 100 hours this summer sculpting a cow that so uncannily resembles a bovine that it could pass for the real thing.
After doing a little research online, she said, “I started drawing it out and projected it onto piece of wood — the base inside is a wood cutout.”
She used a miniature toy cow as a model.
“I just built it up from there” with the Styrofoam she had at hand in art class. “Then I went over it with plaster bandages,” Wimler said.
Wilmer, also a member of the National Honor Society, began in mid-June after school let out for the summer and showed up every weekday morning she could in the shop room to work for about four hours. She used a bread knife to shape the foam, carefully crafting the cow’s curves, and metal files to smooth out the contours.
Once dry, Wimler used white and black house paint to detail the animal.
Wimler was also able to capture the cow’s pink tongue mid-lick. “I saw her painting with that kind of face — its tongue in the nostril curling,” Annino said. “She just smiled and next thing I heard, she did it. I just love that part.”
Her exceptional artistic ability is something mom Jean Wimler recognized from an early age.
“She made her first drawing at 4 — of Cinderella — from printed bedsheets. One day she came out and she had a pillow case — I had bought her sheets — and she had a piece of paper and a pencil and I said, ‘that’s cool. What are you going to do?’
“‘I’m going to draw this,’” her daughter told her. “I couldn’t believe it. It’s a divine gift. She definitely has a different way of looking at things,” Jean Wimler said.
But her daughter’s talent had manifested itself a year earlier, she said.
Jean Wimler recalls teaching the teen how to color within the lines of a coloring book. “‘Do you see these big black lines?’ she asked her daughter. ‘Don’t go outside them.’
“She never did again. I knew then she had a special talent,” said Jean Wimler, who was astonished at the Simba pottery sculpture her daughter gave her as a Mother’s Day gift. “I don’t think there’s anything beyond her reach.”
Just like on a working farm, children at the Durham Fair will have a chance to “milk” the cow, something that took a little bit of brainpower for the young artist to devise.
“At first, [she and Bothamley] were going to use a fish tank pump to get the water back up into it, but I decided not to. Inside, there’s a plastic gas can and I used calf feeders” for the teats, Adriana Wimler said.
Children will be able to squeeze the teats as water shoots out into a bucket beneath.
“People use milking machines now,” Annino said. “Those arms you see now are not like they were 30 years ago, not to mention 50 years ago. You almost had a farm touching a farm back then in Durham,” said the lifelong resident whose grandfather ran a small farm.
“Once the ‘50s started, things changed. Small farms didn’t pay,” Annino said.
Although she has not taught the teen in class, Coginchaug art teacher Julie French admires her work and has heard Bothamley rave about Adriana Wimler’s abilities.
“She’s a star. We’re really proud of her. There’s nothing that she can’t do exceedingly well,” French said. “She’s really a remarkable talent. We like to say she’s a quiet leader. Other students are amazed at her work and she really inspires them to up their game a little bit.”
Adriana Wimler said she conjures up her subject matter by whatever strikes her.
“I get an idea in my head and I’ll just want to make it,” said the teen, who loves horses and has been riding for a decade. She also volunteers at a barn in Wolcott painting large murals and helped out this summer at Faith Living Church’s vacation Bible school, creating scenery and painting signs in Plantsville.
All this work is to bolster her portfolio, said the teen, who aspires to attend the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts or the Rhode Island School of Design.
For now, she paints and draws in her living room. “I just sit on the floor. I’m not picky,” Adriana Wimler said.
“I know how some kids will feel about that opportunity to really get in there and milk a cow and see how it all comes through and comes down,” Annino said of the fair’s newest agricultural attraction.
“That’s what discovery is all about. It’s learning hands on. That’s why I just can’t appreciate this little lady enough. I can’t,” Annino said.
The fair runs Sept. 21 to 24 this year. For information, see durhamfair.com or the Durham Fair on Facebook and Twitter.