Spotty Horses

Original acrylic painting with pastel detail on canvas

Available for purchase

My first painting of the Chinese Year of the Horse, Spotty Horses was shaped by instinct and serendipity.

This work was never intended as a portrait, so the figures are deliberately left soft and unresolved. What matters more is their portrayal of companionship — with each other and their animals — and the way their movement through the landscape suggests journey rather than destination.

Several key elements asserted themselves only as the work developed. The bright pink mountains were initially laid down as an underpainting, never intended to remain visible, but the colour insisted on becoming a defining feature. (I explore my use of pink more fully in my Quiet Love blog post.)

Early on, the tail of one horse took on a playful, exaggerated sweep of rainbow colour that reminded me of My Little Pony. I loved it and chose to keep it — a decision that later felt affirmed when I learned the mare’s name was Voodoo.

The foreground resisted resolution for much of the process — I simply didn’t know how to fill the space. The solution arrived while driving through the Overberg in January, with the restios in full bloom. Their textured seed heads now fill the foreground, echoing the brown spotting on the horses’ coats and visually integrating figure, animal, and terrain.

In the end, Spotty Horses became a study in the gradual unfolding of a work finding its own language.