At Overbrook High School, student's painted cow a potential winner

Gustavo Ramirez, 17, has aspirations of someday opening his own tattoo parlor. The soft-spoken sophomore at Overbrook High School in Pine Hill never expected his first client to be a life-size fiberglass cow.

Ramirez is one of nine finalists - and the only one from New Jersey - selected by a panel of judges from 9,200 entrants nationwide in the seventh annual Lucerne Art of Dairy Contest, an art competition sponsored by Safeway Inc., the grocery chain.

The contest challenges high school students to submit designs that will decorate a bovine sculpture and incorporate this year's theme, "Red, White, and Moo," an ode to both American ingenuity and dairy products.

"I was kind of surprised," Ramirez said of his selection. "I've been an underdog in most competition. I'm not really competitive, art is just something I do."

If Ramirez's design wins, the Pine Hill school's art department will be awarded $20,000 and Ramirez and his art teacher, Larissa Danowitz, will each receive $5,000 cash prizes.

The Overbrook sculpture, which was blank when Safeway shipped it to the school, will be on display at the Cherry Hill Public Library from April 16 to 27.

People from across the country can vote on the nine finalists' designs online - at www.artofdairy.com - from April 16 until May 15.

The runners-up will receive lesser monetary awards.

"In the schools, art is something that is subject to a lot of trimming in school budgets," said Safeway regional spokeswoman Maryanne Crager. "The contest is a way to support art education specifically."

In his first sketches for the contest, Ramirez drew patriotic tableaux of Mount Rushmore and the Founding Fathers, but felt those images were "a bit too predictable" and switched gears, drawing inspiration instead from the pulleys and pipelines signifying American inventiveness.

Ramirez's black-and-white design, Imagination: The Gears that Make America Moove, seems simplistic at first glance.

Upon a more thorough examination, however, details like an industrial gear wheel tucked inside a wheel of Swiss cheese and a chain-link pulley rising from a milk carton reveal the imaginary inner workings of a mechanized cow.

The complex network leads to the cow's brain, which Ramirez replaced with an ice cream cone.

"As soon as [Ramirez] showed me the design, I just knew," Danowitz said. "I just had a really good feeling we would place."

Danowitz said the cow, which she, Ramirez, and other students are helping to paint before it goes on display in April, had inspired a "renewed school spirit" at Overbrook.

"It told them they have the ability to win something," she said.

While Danowitz instructed a first-level art class on color theory, Ramirez was in a far corner of the school studio, meticulously applying black paint with a fine-tipped brush over faint pencil marks on the cow.

Ramirez, who moved to New Jersey from San Fernando, Calif., in the fall, said that Danowitz's course was only the second formal art class he had taken, but that he had drawn recreationally most of his life.

"You're able to express yourself," he said. "If you don't know how to express an idea or thought, you can bring it out to paper and show the world what you see."