artist statement on beasts

All my paintings are “…painterly abstractions that use recognizable shapes to explore the notion of space &the phantasm of light.” *

Sometimes these shapes are barns with strong light casting shadows on land, sometimes boats, light, reflections, nothing. In this series the objects are horses, space, and gerunds: words ending in –ing indicating actions or states of being, as in “being.” As in Standing, Grazing, Wading, and, in this series, Levitating.

These works aren’t ‘about’ horses. They’re ‘of’ horses. And space, and movement. And drawing and paint. Without narratives, they’re ‘riffs’ on creatures being themselves---unbridled, unsaddled, unridden, and apparently untrained. Too wild or too young to behave. Jumping straight into the air, all their power bunched into a jump for no reason, a kind of weighty flight; high jinks. Horsing around.

I usually work in series, riffing on a few elements, improvising on an idea. In the small drawings on canvas in this series ---let’s call them “Riffs”---I’m playing with little drawings, flipping them, turning them, scribbling, collaging and superimposing them to create a sense of flight, dance, play.

Levitation is a beautiful word, I think, and seeing a 1500 pound creature doing it is…well, just wild.

The first idea for a levitating horse came to me in a photograph: a horse is in mid-air, jumping hard and mean to throw a rider whom he is dragging by a foot caught in the stirrup, a man in a world of hurt. But I stripped away the gear and entanglements, and along with them, the narrative, to find the wondrous deed---the levitation, pure and simple. Hence, High Horse.

Then I saw a photograph of a 'gypsy vanner', so-called because gypsies breed them for their flamboyantly colored coats and their strength in pulling vans. In Levitation the vanner is at the apex of a jump straight into the air, ‘feeling his oats’. I put him high on the canvas, poised in the instant between the power drive upward and gravity hauling the heavy bones, the massive body back to earth. The mane and tail are swept up and down at once, grace-notes to the beast’s weight and mass.

The horse is ‘lost in space’, the black and white of the coat against a ground of black and white, a deliberate confusion of mane, tail, coat, and space, figure and ground.

Coloration in painted beasts fascinates me, particularly in horses, where the markings are Nature’s bold expressionism, designed to conceal them---these great big creatures---by confusing their curves and lovely limbs with whatever odd patterns, textures, and colors surround them in the landscape. But of course, the flashy vanner, the colorful pinto, the clownish spotted appaloosa are more likely to stand out in their gaudy coats, unless they’re in a herd.

They are “grand painterly abstractions” in their own right.

My own experiences with horses have been few but powerful.

Riding in a roundup in the Wind River Valley of the Absaroka Mountain Range of Wyoming, bringing cows and their calves down for the winter, I felt so at home, so at one with it all, that, surely in a former life, I must have been a cowpoke or a horse. Or a cow.

In rural Maryland we lived among many horse owners and breeders. Neighbors brought their horses to exercise and play on our land. I painted my first horse after seeing a friend ride slowly by, framed in my studio window. I asked her to bring her horse into the studio, which was on the ground floor. She walked him across the echoing plywood floor and stood him in profile in front of a canvas 8’6” wide, where he fit perfectly.

I stood between the horse and the canvas, where I could run my right hand over his contours and with my left, draw those contours on the canvas, like Thomas Jefferson’s polygraph. Though I’m not ambidextrous, I managed it. When the horse stepped away I had a six-legged moose. Additional work was required.

I have photographed, studied, admired, gazed at, gaped at, pondered, and been blown away by horses, but have rarely ridden them. Maybe this accounts for my painting them bare and unencumbered.

Maybe it’s political. Or aesthetic. Or both.

Carole Bolsey

*“[These paintings] are grand painterly abstractions that use recognizable shapes to explore the notion of space and the phantasm of light.”

Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe, “Seeing the light on her landscapes, brilliantly”, Nov. 18, 1999