In 1993, in his third solo exhibition at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne, John Kelly showed a series of paintings inspired by the wartime experiences of artist William Dobell. Dobell "served first as a camouflage labourer... He was one of a group of several, later famous, artists who had been ordered to make papier mache cows and move them around the base in the hope of fooling Japanese pilots".

Kelly himself was a talented young artist. One of seven children of English migrants, he was only able to attend art school after his mother entered a Win a Wish competition on the side of a milk carton. Prior to the recognition bought by Dobell's Cows, as the series became known, he was twice a finalist in the Moet Chandon Award, Australia's premier annual prize for young artists. He was also awarded an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, which enabled him to study for two years at the Slade School of Art in London. Dobell's Cows was to be the breakthrough series in Kelly's career. He had great fun with the idea and art audiences caught on too, buying cow paintings as fast as he could paint them. He pursued the theme for several more exhibitions, extending it to include other animals such as Phar Lap in tableaus that played on illusion and reality. Side of a Cow 1994 is from Kelly's 1995 exhibition at Niagara Galleries. The 38 paintings showed a much more assured artist, experimenting with groups of stacked cows that were later to inspire his best known work, the painted bronze sculpture Cow up a Tree. Side of a Cow was the odd one out in the show. By focusing on the black and white markings on the flank of the cow, he created an ambiguous and mysterious space that functioned both as landscape and abstraction. Visually witty rather than laugh-out-loud funny, it punned on the work of artists as diverse as David Aspden and Sean Scully. It also gave a glimpse of Kelly's ability to play with visual conventions, if not required to include a cow and a laugh in every painting.

By 2000 the joke was wearing thin for the artist, who titled his solo exhibition of that year More Fucking Cows! Kelly's later work has focused on brands and branding to critique aspects of Australia's official visual art culture. He relocated to Ireland, his father's birthplace, and has been painting landscapes of the Irish coast.
John Cruthers