Ian Calder | Equus Caballus
Horses and humans share a long history, in farming, in transport, in war and in sport. Horses were raced on the plains of Kildare hundreds of years before Saint Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland. The horse is a noble and magnificent beast, both spirited, fiery, gentle and generous.
These paintings pay homage to the great horse painters of the past, Stubbs, Delacroix, Degas, Munnings, and Blackshaw.
The paintings are loose, expressive and unsentimental of the spirit of the horse, painted with a lot of surface interest in the brushwork, but are, nevertheless, anatomically correct. This derives from my intimate knowledge of the animal and my practice in life studies of the human figure. Made by working over thin washes with vigorous brush work and impasto pigment. Rubbing and scraping back to leave ghost images on the canvas, expressing the struggle to resolve the final image. I endeavour to make interesting marks on the canvas that finally resolve in an image of Equus Caballus.