Horses

Deni

3 min read

Horses were my first love.

Long before I ever owned one, I spent countless hours drawing them, reading about them and imagining what it would be like to have one of my own.

Unfortunately, I grew up in a family of city dwellers. We lived in flats, horses were well beyond our means, and there was certainly nowhere to put one. Eventually, my Mom sat me down and explained this to me gently, and the next moment, my Dad walked in with a budgie in a cage. Thus began my lifelong romance with the wonder of birds! However, the horse-mad child was still there and found the next best thing to owning a horse – learning about them.

I collected books.

And more books.

Most of them were factual — breeds, anatomy, behaviour, care, history. I wanted to know everything I could about these magnificent animals. And when I wasn't reading about horses, I was drawing them.

It was my way of getting as close to them as I could.

I got a horse!

Eventually, adulthood gave me the opportunity I had dreamed about as a child.

His name was Cracker Jack, and he came to me from the SPCA. They had been struggling to keep up with the cost of feeding him, so they happily handed him over! When I took him to the stables that would become his new home, we discovered quite a problem.

None of the girths fitted him.

Cracker Jack was an ex-racehorse — and a very, very well-fed one. 😂

He spent the next three months on a carefully managed diet, along with daily lunging, before he was finally slim enough for us to get to work properly.

And what a character he was.

When it was just the two of us, he was wonderful to ride. In the paddock or out and about, we got along beautifully.

But put other horses into the equation and suddenly we weren't simply going for a ride, then we were competing!  Everything was a competition, and Cracker had absolutely no interest in coming second.

If he couldn't lead the pack, he would bounce and prance and stot around as though he had suddenly discovered he was a springbok. My backside would remember those rides for at least three days afterwards!

He could be exasperating, hilarious, challenging and utterly wonderful — sometimes all within the same hour and I loved him.

But horses are expensive animals to keep and in more ways than one. As my career in real estate became increasingly demanding, I found myself with less and less time to give him the life he deserved.

There was a young girl who regularly came to the stables on weekends. She had developed a genuine bond with Cracker and eventually I made the decision to give him to her.

It wasn't easy to let him go, but I was glad to pay the gift of him forward to someone with the same dream and the time and means to make him her No. 1

I'd finally lived the dream.

Horses still hold such a special place in my heart.

I don't paint them simply because I find them beautiful — although I certainly do.

I paint them because there is something about a horse that has always stirred something in me. Their power, their intelligence, their sensitivity and their extraordinary presence.

I think I spent so many years longing to be near them that I learned to really see them.

And now, through my paintings, I get to spend time with them all over again.

This is part of what I am trying to capture when I paint a horse — not simply what it looks like, but what it feels like to stand in communication with them.