Jan Cook Mack grew up in the United States and Taiwan, and received her Fine Arts degree from Bennington College in Vermont. She established herself as a fine artist in New York City before moving to eastern Washington State in 1986. Mack’s paintings arise out of an emotional response to the pursuit of an intimate relationship with the natural world. She began painting dairy cows while living in Vermont in 1970. "The geometry of their weight and placement offered an armature of formal structure which reinforced my realism" she explains. "My love of cows gave me a connection to the activities of farming. Tractors, bales, windrows became subjects. From a distance, farming tools and process seemed like large-scale drawing on the land."