I am so pleased to have the Calgary Health Trust group give me the opportunity to do charity artwork which involved painting a horse….I really mean paint a horse! A life-size fiberglass horse was delivered to my house on Tuesday, and is now standing in my dining room!
It took me about a month to continually paint him. Sometimes he would startle me as I rounded a corner and realized there was a full size horse in my house. I was able to work on him daily, sometimes several times a day. I loved the progression of the paint as I moved towards my artistic goal.
Painting this horse for the Renfrew Recovery Centre was an important aspect of the design, even down to the each colour I added to show emotion and turmoil. There are areas on the horse that express grief and pain, while others are full of movement or turbulence. Pathways reach up out of the darker colours grasping towards the light. I tried to show the journey that someone might have out of addiction and substance abuse, or depression.
I decided to name him Freedom’s Journey. Not only did it depict the emotion that I set out to achieve, but also I felt that the name might be a good horse name. I was a little emotional when they loaded him into the truck to take him back to Spruce Meadows….there was a part of me that wanted to keep this charity artwork for myself, my own emotional journey, but knew that he needed to be shared.
Enjoy the links to videos we put together of the process…or journey…
