Gallery One Recent Works

Running on Ancestry

Acrylic on paper
39”x33”
Framed

Years in the Making

In the late 1960's I was art director of the Commercial Sign & Design Division of Naegele Outdoor Advertising Company. At that time, as a young artist, I was experimenting with different styles and forms of artistic expression. I once drew an intricate study of a group of horses in different stances and poses, intertwined with one another. I don’t recall much more about the drawing or what I intended to do with it, except, it was to be a painting. Life moved on, I put the drawing in a portfolio with other drawings and papers and was forgotten for many years.

A year or so ago going through some old art things, to my surprise, there it was after forty years. I recently painted the horses on a sheet of Arches heavy weight, handmade, paper, which was also in the portfolio with the drawing. This is a one-of-a-kind painting, meant for a horse lover, or someone who wishes to own a truly original, unique, piece of art.

In my research, I've discovered, the dawn of the horse goes back to America where the only fossils of Eohippus, the ancestor of the modern horse have been found. Over millions of years, until the last ice age separated America from the rest of the world, herds of horses migrated across land bridges to Asia and other places beyond. Shown in this illustration are representations of the prehistoric cave painting from 15,000 B.C. in Lascaux, France, a depiction of a charioteer in the Sumerian infantry 2,500 B.C. and a symbolic statue of the horse (Equus caballus). At the top of the painting silhouetted against the blue starry sky are six horses running on the backs of their heritage, each representing 10 million years of existence.