''I saw a cow, and I drew a cow.'' In those words, artist Peggy Judy succinctly sums up the earliest memory—from when she was about 2 years old—that foreshadowed her current career as a fine artist depicting the animals, people, and landscapes of the American West.



She was riding in the back seat of the family car on an outing not far from where they lived in a rural area near Morrison, CO, just west of Denver. Back home, young Peggy grabbed a sheet of paper and a brown crayon—''because it was a brown cow''—and produced what she describes today as ''just a very simple line drawing, but you could see it was a cow.'' Her parents framed the work and proudly displayed it on the living-room wall.



Jump forward some 57 years to today, and you'll find Judy's paintings hanging on the walls of galleries across Colorado and in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Minnesota, and New York. They've also been featured and won prizes in leading western museums and shows. The works are impressive in their own right, and all the more so for the fact that she began actively pursuing her fine-arts career little more than five years ago. ''It's very storybook,'' says Judy, now 59, of her success. ''I pinch myself all the time.''