Imagined after Edvard Munch
A group of melancholy black cows sleeping under a tree on a ranch in kauai. They're hungover because their diet is only beer and macadamia nuts (depressing). make sure the sadness of the situation is conveyed - think picasso blue period. no humans, only sad cows. the cows/tree should be far away.
After Edvard Munch, made 2026-08-27. An AI-imagined work, credited after the artist and grounded in documented technique; not a historical work.
The statement
I have painted these cows far off under their tree because I wanted to paint the feeling of their condition rather than the animals themselves. Like the figure I once described standing on a road above the fjord, exhausted and trembling, these creatures are isolated in their misery — but where I sensed "an infinite scream passing through nature," here there is only a dull, unnatural stupor, a sadness that has nowhere to go.
I have tried again and again to capture not the outward appearance of cattle but the inner state — the depressive weight of a diet that poisons rather than nourishes, the hangover that is both physical and spiritual. I have drawn on the melancholy palette and dissolving forms I once used for human grief, because these cows suffer a condition as real as any I have painted in my Frieze of Life. They are creatures forced into an absurd and degrading existence, and I wanted the viewer to feel that wrongness.
The distance keeps them remote, unreachable — like all suffering we see but cannot touch. The tree offers no real shelter, only a marker of their confinement. This is a poem of exhaustion and quiet despair.
Make your own
Ask Munch for a picture of your own · About Edvard Munch · The gallery