10 Horses Series
The Work
I saw most of the Ten Horses either on one of the many farms around Durham, New Hampshire, where I live, or at the University of New Hampshire stables near by.
Those are facts, but facts do not necessarily reveal meaning.
The other day I happened to find a page of notes by my friend and colleague at the University of California, the distinguished Carravagio scholar, Alfred Moir. He was commenting on an essay I had written about my work many years ago. He observed that most of my essay was concerned with form, and place and the facts. He then writes:
Sorry to keep harping on this, but how much does feeling affect your paintings, and how aware are you of it? I don’t necessarily mean simple feelings ….but the subtle ones--elegance, lassitude, restlessness, just to write words at random.
I know what he meant, but you write about what you can write about. My feelings are in the chalk line tracing the form of the horse, the paint, and the developing image. Initially perhaps it is something about the animals themselves, elegance, lassitude, fatigue and sometimes evidence of either age or the need to be cared about. I do not know for a fact, of course, what the actual emotional states the horses experience, but I am led as I work to develop those feelings which may, in the first place, reside in me. A journal entry made in 1928 by Andre Gide is as true for painting as it is for writing:
Nothing good is achieved unless the balance happens to be upset between the real world and the mind’s creation, the latter appearing, for a time, more real than the other
Don Lent March 23, 2011
I saw most of the Ten Horses either on one of the many farms around Durham, New Hampshire, where I live, or at the University of New Hampshire stables near by.
Those are facts, but facts do not necessarily reveal meaning.
The other day I happened to find a page of notes by my friend and colleague at the University of California, the distinguished Carravagio scholar, Alfred Moir. He was commenting on an essay I had written about my work many years ago. He observed that most of my essay was concerned with form, and place and the facts. He then writes:
Sorry to keep harping on this, but how much does feeling affect your paintings, and how aware are you of it? I don’t necessarily mean simple feelings ….but the subtle ones--elegance, lassitude, restlessness, just to write words at random.
I know what he meant, but you write about what you can write about. My feelings are in the chalk line tracing the form of the horse, the paint, and the developing image. Initially perhaps it is something about the animals themselves, elegance, lassitude, fatigue and sometimes evidence of either age or the need to be cared about. I do not know for a fact, of course, what the actual emotional states the horses experience, but I am led as I work to develop those feelings which may, in the first place, reside in me. A journal entry made in 1928 by Andre Gide is as true for painting as it is for writing:
Nothing good is achieved unless the balance happens to be upset between the real world and the mind’s creation, the latter appearing, for a time, more real than the other
Don Lent March 23, 2011
