decorahnews.com feature: Holy Cow! Decorah gets another mural

Decorah's latest mural is named "Irene."  Waukon artists Valerie and Josh Miller were hard at work Monday painting the side of the Oneota Co-op building on Water Street, making way for one of their "Steel Cow" murals.

The two have already created cow murals at WW Homestead Dairy, the Waukon Library and the corner of Main Street and Allamakee Street in Waukon.  But they're wanting to "spread out" a little, so they sent an e-mail to the Oneota Co-op asking if it would want a mural--and got a positive response in 10 minutes.

Valerie tells decorahnews.com she's long been "obsessed with cows."  It dates back to a trip her family took to Switzerland, where they saw the cows and heard the cowbells--all with a backdrop of the Swiss Alps.  "It was the most beautiful thing ever," she says.

So when Valerie went to Bradley University in Peoria and met Josh the very first week and they wound up getting married, she says she came to Northeast Iowa "looking at cows in a new way."

In fact, she names each piece of cow art.  Previous murals were "Anna" and "Paula" and "Tippy."  The mural on the side of the Oneota Co-op is "Irene" because it's named after a cow owned by a local Organic Valley family farm that supplies milk to the Co-op.

More information about Steel Cow is available at http://www.steelcow.com/

To create the mural, the two artists created a grid in blue chalk and filled in each grid space according to a sheet that also had grid lines