Don’t all little girls love horses? I sure did. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing and the first thing I remember drawing was a horse.
I was very young, maybe even preschool, sitting in a room with a plastic play horse, trying to capture it with paper and pencil. My dad wandered by and came in to see what I was drawing. He pointed out to me that the horse’s legs were rounded, not flat, and if I shaded the sides of the legs with my pencil the horse legs on my drawing would look rounded, too.
As Jimmy Buffet would say: so simple like the boogaloo. It blew my little mind and I never forgot it.
When I was still in elementary school I had a girlfriend, Leslie, who kept her pony, Spotty, at a stable near my house. Every now and then Leslie would let me ride Spotty, but my version of riding meant that I kind of hung on and hoped for the best.
I loved hanging out at that stable, though, and seeing all the horses – especially an elderly Shetland pony that wandered the grounds. I liked him because he was just about my height and his days of sowing wild oats were long past. Very gentle and sweet natured, not intimidating like those giant horses. Who would be crazy enough to try to ride them?
That would be me.
One day someone offered to put me up on one of those grown-up horses and in a moment of temporary insanity I said yes. I was a scrawny kid, probably all of four feet tall at that point, and that horse was huge.
Was I scared? You bet, and that horse knew it. He decided to show who was the boss – as if there was any question – and tried to get rid of me as quickly as possible.
He took off like a bat out of hell (I believe bolting is the official horse term) and ran under low-hanging tree branches, hoping to scrape me off the saddle. He went on like that for hours.
Well, probably it was only a matter of minutes but long enough that my young life passed before my eyes multiple times. And I had time to make a bargain with the universe: I would leave the giant horse riding to those who knew what they were doing and in exchange I would get to keep on living. Several years later, after my first experience with downhill skiing, I made a similar bargain. I have kept my promises.
I was reading about the symbolism of horses recently. Black horses are said to represent your shadow self, the part of you that you keep hidden from the world (and often from yourself) while white horses represent your self-awareness. Black/white, dark/light, yin/yang…bingo! The idea for this painting was born. It’s sort of the horse version of yin yang.
Note to self: Embrace both your light and your dark sides – you can learn a lot from each.