The Equine Series: Memory – Majesty – Intuition
My Horse Series follows the same artistic philosophy as my other work: intimate, with a purposely cropped format—a lens into one’s inner self through the eye of a noble beast. It’s sewn together from memory and a deeply personal reverence for the subject. I grew up on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, and while I later studied in Florence, Italy, those early rural memories never left me. My childhood home was surrounded by nature—an apple orchard to the east, forest to the west, cornfields to the north, and to the south… a horse farm on a rolling hill.
In spring, when the weather softened, I’d slip through the barbed-wire fences into the horse fields—toward sun-warmed boulders on the hillside, where I’d sit and sketch. I absorbed everything: the warmth of the sun, the horses’ movements, the smell of the fields, sunlight shimmering off their coats, and the silence of it all. Because of my naïveté, I didn’t realize I was creating my own creative, meditative escape from reality. I understood that the house I was raised in was not a child’s home; I needed that space—my escape. It was peaceful, and it was mine. When I look back, those moments appear in my memory like a Sofia Coppola-style, lens-flared cinematic scene—captured in my mind rather than on film.
Around the age of forty, I fell asleep one evening and visited the horses again in my dreams. That lens-flared memory reappeared in my subconscious: their soft muzzle-to-muzzle touch, the beat of their breath on their nostrils, the approaching sound of hooves on the hillside—all from a young boy’s point of view. My friends were still there… but something felt different: the horses loomed enormous, almost surreal in scale. When I awoke, I knew instantly — I had grown up, and the world had given me the perspective of an adult man. I needed to paint them immediately… in that way—massive, intimate, visceral. That dream became the foundation of the Equine Series—intentional, up-close compositions that capture majesty as perceived by a child: unfiltered and magnified. My horses convey the emotional truth of a memory, preserved in pigment, and invite the viewer into the sacred discovery of a moment seen through the lens of a young boy.
Hence the title of one of my paintings… Sleepy Summer Memories.
