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By admin, January 22, 2010 3:10 pm

This post is part of our series of posts showing the most inspiring images from the biggest galleries on the web presented throughout the day. Continue reading 'Inspiration'»

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By admin, January 6, 2010 11:40 am

This post is part of our series of posts showing the most inspiring images from the biggest galleries on the web presented throughout the day. Continue reading 'Inspiration'»

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By admin, December 23, 2009 4:25 pm

This post is part of our series of posts showing the most inspiring images from the biggest galleries on the web presented throughout the day. Continue reading 'Inspiration'»

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By admin, December 16, 2009 1:34 pm

A few years ago I had a dream – a native woman (native to where, I am not sure) sat atop the world getting information from ‘above’ about how she was a protector of the Earth and her equine ancestors were going to help her. I saw tree roots growing from her feet, encircling the planet as horses rushed to surround her, offering their help in the form of energy.

Yes, well… I agree, that was a very strange dream! I awoke the next morning and sketched the memory so it wouldn’t fade over time, documenting exactly how I saw the details of the woman’s posture, the light beam from above taking the shape of a star, and even the coloring of some of the horses. It was almost a year later when using the drawings I had made that morning, I sketched out the whole composition onto a canvas. That canvas rested on an easel in my house in New York for two more years while I traveled and relocated to Denver.

I brought the unfinished canvas to Denver almost a year ago and rested it against a wall with a stack of other empty canvases and one or two finished ones, and then promptly forgot about it. I had completed a few paintings in the interim and when I was taking inventory of canvases I had and canvases yet needed for the multitudes of ideas pouring into my head when there appeared the dream painting canvas. At first it seemed to quietly suggest to me that I might want to finish. I put it at the front of the stack then went about my business for a few days.

From the corner of the room where the canvases rested I could have sworn I heard, “Ahem…” a few times. I would look up from my computer very quickly and catch site of the native woman still in her peaceful, trance-like position, the horses frozen in time looking at her.

“I guess that wasn’t you,” I would say, responding in the painting’s direction.

Time passed and I became busily engaged in writing, finishing one or two other works which just seemed simpler to me. Sometimes I would awake in the night and the dream painting would enter my thoughts. I would begin to imagine how I might represent the earth in the dream, or how that beam of light would be as luminescent as it was in the dream. I guess you could say the painting just wouldn’t stay out of my mind for long.

You would think that after all that time the actual mechanics of completing the painting would be simple enough. I mean, for Heaven’s sake! How much time does an artist have to ‘imagine’ painting something before she can just sit down and do it? It felt like an eternity. The horses are always the most complicated part of a painting for me. Not because of their difficulty necessarily, but rather because I like to make them so detailed that I can almost feel the personality of each animal. That takes time and I do a good portion of them (especially their faces) with a very fine brush. It is a process of love. I never get overly frustrated when painting horses. The people and backgrounds – well, that’s another story. I guess I don’t have the same ‘affinity’ for people as I do horses! I finished the horses, each taking at least a day, maybe 4-5 hours of painting, and then I would stop for several days leaving the painting in full view in my studio, calling to me to not forget it yet again!

Eventually portion by portion, day after day, the painting came together until I could call it ‘probably complete’. As it is with almost all of my paintings, I can imagine I might add a little here and there, change this or that, but that is well in the future – if ever. I feel I have given birth to this work I call “Equine Ancestors” with plenty of labor pains but also, always with the happy expectation of the final blessed event when I could introduce my ‘baby’ to the world like a proud parent… well, almost…

Sometime soon I will make this painting available as a limited edition canvas print, but for now you can have a look at it here at my blog.

Now on to the next!