"You Shall Have All the Pretty Horses" (24x36 oil & cold wax on canvas)
The completion of this painting is a testament to the abstracts of life that secretly slip into one's art. I started this painting with a human figure in mind alongside the horse. I decided I didn't like the composition so I eliminated the figure which left me with a simple dark horse against the seaside. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to paint some bold flower shapes all over the horse. While I was working all of this out, I was also rereading McCarthy's novel, All the Pretty Horses. I came to a page where I'd previously highlighted a paragraph that read: "He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world's heart beat at some terrible cost, and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity, and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower." It wasn't until I realized I'd been creating a horse painting with a distinctive flower print that I saw the influence of what my senses consume. At the time of creating the painting, I couldn't have told you why I wanted to paint this horse this way. But now it seems so obvious that reading McCormac's words about the otherworldly beauty of horses would be so directly inspirational.