Purchase, N.Y. ? Any artist can paint cows. Nathan Banks paints on cows.

Banks, a 22-year-old student at Purchase College, painted single words (from “a” to “existential”) on the flanks of about 60 cows near his upstate New York home, then let them wander around to see if they could compose poetry.

So Holsteins and Jerseys came up with phrases like “eccentric art,” “performance as cow environment” and Banks’ own favorite, “organic conceptual art as poetry.”

One animal seemed especially inspired – with “away” written on her side, she broke loose from the herd for a while.

The “Cow Project,” with videotape and photos of the bovine bards, goes on display Thursday at the college.

“The idea is that the artist sets up the situation and then it carries through on its own,” Banks said.

The entire three-day episode was documented by Banks and a couple dozen other students, who were bused up to Delaware County, in the northern foothills of the Catskills, for the mid-September happening.

“It was peculiar,” said Gerry Ruestow, who let Banks use so-called “tail paint” – a harmless substance that eventually flakes off – on his dairy herd in Sidney Center. “Those art people tend to do things that are a little bit outside the box. We did get some people who wandered by to see what the crazies up the road were doing.”

Banks, a senior, said the project cost him about $1,000 and he had to overcome a few obstacles. Half a dozen dairy farmers turned him down before Ruestow and his wife, Susan, Banks’ old music teacher, agreed to let him use their Fermata Farm.

Purchase College art student Nathan Banks holds a photo of himself painting a cow as part of an art project. Banks painted words on cows at a dairy farm in Sydney Center, N.Y., and waited for them to roam around and form phrases.

“There was a big concern that the cows would be stressed and give less milk,” Banks said. Gerry Ruestow said milk production actually went up a bit, “probably because the cows were a bit more active. The cows were as interested in the observers as the observers were in the cows.”

Working around the milking schedule, Banks painted the words in foot-tall blue and orange letters while the cows were in their stalls. He wanted to put a word on both sides of every cow, but some of the animals were skittish about it and ended up with just one word.

“They’re used to being milked from the same side all the time, and they didn’t like being approached on the other side,” Banks said.

Then there were the necessary touchups. Some cows messed up their words when they lay down, or swished their tail, or got a little cow pie on them.

“I’d repaint, right over the manure,” Banks said.

Visitors to the exhibit will be encouraged to make their own cow poetry by taking a tiny cardboard cow, writing a word on it and setting it down on the vibrating board from an old electric football game so it can wander and interact with other cows.