Marjorie Moore:

The Draw of Horses


I have been working as an artist for 30 years, no, let me change that…. I have been working as an artist since I was a child and as a professional artist for 30 years. I was educated at Syracuse University with a major in fine arts.

My work has crossed many media lines over the years; I started my career making puppets and fabric sculpture. I've worked in theatre design and video performance, besides more traditional media, but when push comes to shove, I have always called myself a painter. Because no matter what media I have used, it is always about the 2 dimensional creating illusion of the 3 dimensional. That's what artists do….create illusion. For more information on my career see my resume and narrative biography.

The subject matter of my work has crossed many lines too…from visions of deer running in the Maine woods to monkeys frolicking in circus spaces. For a very long time I have collected old toys, children's books, and various objects of my desire. And all of these "things" revolve around my interest in human/animal relationships. How we as humans view animals, how we categorize the natural world. We tend to know more about animals from nature programs, cartoons, and glossy magazines than we do from experience.

In my world, all of the above create fodder for my work. A toy 'Jocko' is as important to my vision, as the actual red howler monkeys I studied in Venezuela. The combination of popular culture and science has fed my work for a long time. It is a subject that is endlessly fascinating. And it is the continuous joy of trying to put this interest onto the canvas or paper that pushes me into the studio day after day after day.

So, why horses, now?
When I was a 'horse crazy' girl, I drew horses endlessly. I copied them out of comic books. I loved those black shadows and those work bubbles exclaiming… 'NEIIIGGGHHH!' or WHHIINNEY! And I did do a few pieces relating to that subject some years ago. But last year I had a vision.

People whom I know in the horse world (I am the proud owner and rider of two great Morgan geldings), often asked me why I never did any drawings and paintings of my horses. I would reply that I really didn't know how I would do that. Number one, there is such a long history of artmaking about horses from the cave paintings at Lascaux, to George Stubbs (the great English painter of animals, particularly known for his horse portraiture), to Susan Rothenberg and Deborah Butterfield, two well known contemporary artists. This long history can be intimidating for an artist.

Secondly, I had no interest in making romantic paintings of horses running about with manes blowing in the wind, of the sort one sees in catalogues. This is not the kind of art that feeds my soul. And number three, I would reply, is that I feel so close to my horses that I can't see them clearly enough to try to paint them. But it was just this last thought that eventually gave me my vision.

Why not do close intimate drawings of these animals that depict what I see all the time. The process of grooming, for example, puts one right next to, that is, up close and personal, with all of their amazing body parts. Riding also puts one in a relationship with the animal that is close connection in movement. The rider's eye shifts from the ear to the poll, the rider's seat shifts ever so slightly and the horse's body responds.

In these recent drawings and paintings of horses I am depicting these animals, using a cropping technique, so that parts of the body of the horse become redefined. An eye, or the tip of a nose becomes the focal point for the picture, leaving the rest of the animal to be imagined. The individual parts form a picture and the works take on a poignant intimacy of a very close relationship.

This is a subject, that, in the end, is really about love.

Marjorie Moore
May, 2003