Horses, horses

A friend of mine from down east commissioned me to do a painting. Not just of any old thing, but a painting of a horse. I like horses — who doesn’t? —but don’t know much about them. Many years ago, I went on a winter trail ride with some friends. I got my own horse to ride. These were not the sleepy kinds of horses that you usually find at trail riding places. These were wilder, or else the cold made them frisky, or maybe the constellation Orion was freaking them out. Like I said, I don’t know much about horses. Anyway, these wanted to run like hell.

I did find out that evening that, unlike the movies, horses do not stop when you scream “whoa” in a panicky voice while atop their backs. In fact, this makes them go faster. It makes them scared and annoyed, and they gallop so that you will also be scared and annoyed. I bet if you are learning to ride, galloping full blast is something you work up to. Well, I skipped the beginner stuff. I screamed “whoa” until this pony was sprinting. If you’ve never done it, you can’t believe how scary it is to gallop on a horse. And did you know that, when your horse takes a really sharp turn, his or her hooves become visible out to one side? Those corners were treacherously icy. A car would have skidded going that fast. Had my reckless horse considered the consequences? I didn’t know. I still don’t know. We galloped all the way home, and then my horse stopped by himself. Or herself. We didn’t look each other in the eye after that, after what had happened.

So as I say, I don’t know anything about horses. But I figured that painting them must be easier than riding them. Also, it so happened that, in the week of that commission, another friend took me to a movie, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It is about the Chauvet caves in France, which are full of gorgeous cave paintings, many of them horses, all of them 32,000 years old. The movie was very beautiful, shadowy and cinematic. The popcorn was very salty.

I came home and immediately wanted to do my own cave paintings. Lacking a proper cave wall, I made do with a canvas. The image above I made as the Chauvet ones are thought to have been made, though the pigments came from tubes. I used my hands, and a piece of charcoal. Also, there is some dirt mixed in with the paint. Hey, it’s art, man. You can do whatever you want.

For about 24 hours I thought I would do a whole series of cave-canvas paintings. Cloudy thought that was brilliant. He was over the moon about it. But then I changed my mind. In art, you can do that.