Horse: Sense and Secrets

Bausch + Lomb Local Artist Exhibition, Rochester, NY

July 2014

“Do you give the horse his strength or clothe his neck with a flowing mane? Do you make me leap like a locust, striking terror with is proud snorting? He paws fiercely, rejoicing in his strength, and charges into the fray.” Job 39:19-21

Even the most accomplished rider or experience horse trainer has to recognize the subtle mystery in our understanding of the horse. Though the greatest horseman can possess a gift of flawless communication, the horse still hides his secrets. No matter the years of experience or hours spent working with one horse, there will always be something hidden, a guarded treasure inside their mind that we can never delve deep enough to find. They remain aloof, wild.

In this series, it was my desire to emphasize that enigmatic side of the horse and foster the sense of that secretive equine nature in each of my paintings. I wanted to focus on the cloud of mystery that will always surround our idea of what we know about the horse. Riders, trainers, and handlers can dedicate their whole lives to studying the mind of the horse and even the greatest of these will surrender to the fact that their equine partners are hiding something between those two tall, slender ears. 

As a horsewoman with decades spent with my heart and hands enslaved to the horse, I know firsthand what that cloud of mystery feels like. I am all too familiar with that burning desire to know just what is going on in that equine mind. With the thousands of horses I have met in those many years guiding me, I worked to create a group of paintings that captured the aloofness that horses will forever hold. I chose to use black, white and silver to simplify the color palette and add to the shadowy, alluring nature that encompasses the mystique of the horse. I also wanted to capture a strong contrast in the expression of the form of the horse. I used an abstract style that relies more on the suggestion of the equine form and not a spelled out depiction. I felt that painting the form of the horse in a more suggested, abstract way was similar to how a horseman has to think abstractly and infer meaning when attempting to guess at what a horse is thinking. It is my hope that the color, abstract style, and acrylic painting techniques used all contribute to making the viewer experience, understand, and appreciate what every horseman has to do when trying to communicate with these secretive animals. I hope that these paintings reflect that mystery and our inability as humans to really master and control something truly wild and beautiful.