Alecia Underhill, Equine Artist, talks about the art of painting horses and the life of an artist.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Winter Work
It's been a prolific month for painting. Cold weather, snow, freezing rain, all makes for long cozy days in the studio. Supplied with a brand new watercolor block, a ten-pack of 11 x 14 stretched canvases, and a few other odd-sized gallerywrap canvases around, I have been able to launch into new work, often with up to five or six pieces in progress at a time. I'll showcase the most recent oils in this post. At the top is an oil sketch of a warmblood mare. My goal here was to keep this piece loose and painterly, and to finish it in two painting sessions. Goal accomplished. It is a challenge to capture light and shadow on such a complex beast as a horse using a bare minimum of brush strokes. I loved the shot I had of this mare, the pose had so much movement, the shadows and reflected light were describing her form perfectly.
Next I completed two more in my flower series. I am enjoying the delicate forms of flowers as much as the living, moving musculature of horses. It is fun to work with colors in my palette that I rarely use in the horse paintings. Here we have two 12 x 12 gallerywrap canvases, of a crabapple blossom and a magnolia flower.
And then it was back to horses. "Arabian Light" is a more tightly finished study than the warmblood, but I wanted to really capture that crisp summer sunlight on this white horse. Seeing this image next to the magnolia makes me want to put together a display of white horses and white flowers.
