Wednesday, April 29, 2009

More on Relationships

Well we all know good relationships depend on communication and it appears that these two are indeed communicating. While we know horses don't speak in human language they sure have a language of their own!

These two seem very at peace with each other and there certainly is a yin and yang effect with the black and the white.

I sent off five images tonight with the hopes that one of them will work for the project. Keep your fingers crossed!

"Horses speak in silence, never forgetting to listen." Carolyn Resnick

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Exploring Relationships

I was recently asked to submit four images using horses that best represented the concept of relationships. Part of the challenge for me is that the work needs to be in a portrait format and much of my work that satisfied the request is in landscape format. There is an urgency to this, leaving no time to photograph so off to my archives of images I went!

A relationship is normally viewed as a connection between two individuals and as far as I am concerned the two individuals may be two horses, two people or a person and a horse. While people are not always clear about their relationships the good news is that horses are! Because horses are herd animals and also prey animals, it is imperative that they know how they relate to one another for the sake of survival. Horses also like to have consistent relationships and leadership from their humans.

I decided on head shots for the task because I felt the closeup gave a sense of intimacy, which may or may not be part of a relationship. These two horses enjoy the company of one another immensely and seem to respect and relate well to each other. All the key ingredients of a great relationship I would say!

Be on the lookout for the next equine relationship!

Monday, April 27, 2009

windhorseOne Studios: News & Ramblings

Well it has been a while since I have blogged. Lots has happened including a four foot snow storm a little over a week ago! Power was out for three days and the phone and internet were out for four. What a goopy mess it is up here.

I have been receiving lots of good news back from the assortment of juried shows I have been busy entering. PZask Gallery in CA is taking three of my pieces for an exhibit called Spirit of the Horse. I was really happy about that! They were shipped out and hopefully will find happy new homes!

Saturady I received news that one of my pieces was accepted in the fine art division of the Equestrian Photographers Network Equine Ideal contest. This one really excited me because my work tends to look more like paintings and most of the work in the contest is traditional photography. The photography is really great so I advise checking it out. There is an amateur and professional division and you can vote for your favorite photograph. Check it out and click here! After the voting is complete I will find out where my image, baroque Three, placed amongst the ten.

Today I learned that the one piece (spiritus Seven) I entered into the Western States Horse Expo Equine Dream Art Show was also accepted. The jury fee was $35 per image - YIKES - so I only entered one and kept my fingers crossed. spiritus Seven was also one of the three that just shipped to CA. Good thing we photographers have editions of our work or I would be out of luck on that one!

Last week all my new note cards were finished and they look great. The hard part is deciding how I want to box the sets. I am thinking of 6 cards, 2 of 3 different images....

My summer schedule is starting to fill in with art festivals we will be attending. We decided to stay in CO this summer. So far we will be at the Denver Fine Art Festival, Boulder 29th Street, Beaver Creek, and Aspen. I will post the dates when I am not too lazy to look them up!

The horses are shedding so I will be gearing up to do some commissions soon. I can't wait!

I think that is it for what this artist has been up to lately!

Bye for now and thanks for reading!
Susan

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

The Equinest: Featured Artist


I am both honored and delighted to be a featured artist on the Equinest web site. Working with Paige was just a delight! She has created a great site for lots of interesting horsey articles. All I know is she must not sleep much to be able to produce the content that she does. Thanks a million Paige for a job well done!

To read more about things like my creative influences click here!

So I wonder what is up with Kairos, Zephyr, and Scooter these days?!! There hasn't been a peep out of them lately. Rumor has it they have all been getting along famously and don't have too much to say right now (if you can believe that! Ha LOL)

Sunday, April 12, 2009

windhorseOne Studios: New Work

Original Workup

I hope everybody had a happy Easter! I was sooo busy prepping all my new note cards today so I can run down to the printer tomorrow that I forgot it was Easter until later this afternoon!

Last night I started on this piece. I rarely create imagery with people in it but I am prepping some work for the Coors Western Exhibit held in Denver each year at the annual National Stock Show. They only take 2 photographers and they seem to rotate them out. They also take very few contemporary artists but YES they do accept them. This is an amazing show and much of the art sells on the red carpet opening night. I do have working stock horses in some of my work I can use but I dug this photo out of some folder on my hard drive and decided it was perfect.

This was taken last fall out at Return to Freedom at their annual fundraiser. I was exhibiting there and they had all the exhibitors in a circle around the show so we were able to watch. There were some amazing performances. They have a similar image on their web site so I cruised on over to check it out and I saw the man's name so I googled him. Turns out he his name is David Midthunder and he is an actor! It was a public event with all sorts of press and I never thought I would be using this image so of course I never asked for a model release! The good news is he has an email on his site so I can email him about using the picture.

I did some cropping to remove his identity and low and behold I think I like this version better! It leaves so much more to the imagination.

Workup Two

Here is a third version with some different cropping.

Workup Three

Let me know if any of these tickle you more than the other!

Have a great week!
Susan
windhorseOne Studios
www.windhorseone.com

Friday, April 10, 2009

Horse as Teacher Book: Status Update

Today has been a most frustrating day....I decided to create a Facebook listing for windhorseOne Studios and I ended up making multiple pages on one email address. Ugh! I am normally pretty software savvy and it was only after a whole day of making entries I realized I had made a "friend" listing and not a business listing so now I have 2 FB pages under one email.

Well, on to other things as I am a bit punchy right now! My new book Horse as Teacher: The Path to Authenticity Through Horses was sent off to the publisher this week. It is right on track for a mid-May delivery. Yeah! I am really excited about being an author of my first book.

This book is coming out with a wave of other equine spiritually related books like Kathy Pike's Hope: From the Heart of Horses and Mark Rashid's new one too (Whole Heart Whole Horse; Building Trust Between Horse and Rider). Both are from Colorado too by the way!

The chapter I contributed was about how my life paralleled the lives of the wild mustangs in both their native habitat and also captivity and how the imagery I captured mirrored and transformed my life. When I woke up and realized it!

I would like to share a few excerpts from my chapter "The Horses Are Calling...." with you:

"Meanwhile the horses had waited patiently in that darkness, waiting to be unleashed with all their creative unbridled energy. They were on call, ready to assist me. I could leap onto their backs, to take off on my pilgrimage of reawakening and wholeness harnessing their strength while infusing their energy. Truth be told, it was time to allow, but even more than that, time to trust myself and give myself permission to be guided back on my life's journey; reclaiming my creative birthright by rekindling the ash-shrouded, softly-glowing embers of my passion for the horses.

Leaving the fancy jet-setting marketing career behind took courage, but the horses long corralled and buried in the past were anxious to emerge and share their messages. The images that evolved in the Windhorse series had been hidden in my memory and were now appearing as guides; courage, destiny, spirit, and others. What unfolded in the upcoming months was a sequence of events where my Windhorse would fly down from above, grab me, toss me onto her back, and I would return to my path of the horse with such intensity I would be spinning.

The artwork that evolved was laying a solid foundation for the powerful and rich excavation of my soul that was yet to come. And while I naievly thought I was done healing, this was just the beginning. If there was one thing I was sure about, it was that I wanted to create and share with the world beautiful works of art with the voices of the horses that would elevate people's levels of consciousness; the gift the horses had given to me. To fully reflect this in my creations, I had to be in union with my true self and listen to my heart, which connected intimately with the horses. In this connection there is an awareness of the timeless essence of the universe within and without, while simultaneously networked to all other beings like a gossamer web. Sharing this with the world through my creations was extremely important to me, and I hoped that the Windhorses would help others find the infinite silence within themselves and heal. My burning desire was to help both horses and people with my artwork. But I was still lacking much needed clarity."

There are 9 more poignant and touching stories from women about how horses have touched their lives - each a life lesson shared and to be learned.

The price of the book is $19.95 and I am offering free shipping as well as signed copies for any order placed pre-release. In addition I am including a free 5" x 7" notecard with envelope of one of my beautiful prints that has a retail value of $4.00. This makes a great gift for any horse lover in your life! or of course yourself!

To order your copy now click HERE on this secure PayPal link

Thanks! and bye for now,

Susan
windhorseOne Studios
www.windhorseone.com

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Appaloosa Family


Well here it is as promised - the third appaloosa piece. I like things in threes. Believe it or not I have had this image for about nine years and never worked it up! If memory serves me they are all brothers and also related to a filly I had either through her sire or her older brother. I am not sure I like the all white background but these spotty lads are pretty graphic so for now I am holding off on adding any more busyness. Who knows what tomorrow may bring!

Are you seeing spots before your eyes? Sorry -bad joke!

I always looked forward to the new spring arrivals at the farm back east. Some of the foals were highly colored like these fine fellas and others were few spot whites. My filly was black with a white star and seven white spots on her rump. Then the next thing I knew she shed out and was a blue roan with a white blanket, black spots and a new white mane and tail!

I am busily working on a line of note cards and I thought I would do 3 or 4 sets of six cards (each box will have 3 designs - 2 of each). I pulled out all my small visuals and before I knew it I was up to seven or eight sets! I have never been known to be really decisive.

Well that's all folks. At least for this evening!

Chau,
Susan
windhorseOne Studios
www.windhorseone.com

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Spiritus Series

I was busy today sorting through a lot of the images that I have created lately wondering where they belong in the different bodies of work I have created. Sometimes it feels like I have started a whole new series before really completing an existing one. That is the great fun of being an artist! I always follow my inspiration and rarely have a preconceived notion of what the finished piece is going to look like.

This piece was patiently waiting in one of my many folders. I have worked on it off and on again for about nine months and was never quite satisfied with it but today I was able to bring it close to completion.

The traveling art show season is about to begin and I have lots to do to prepare for it. I start off the season at Dressage for the Cure in Colorado Springs this month. The show runs from April 24th to the 26th.

There are also plenty of juried exhibits all clustered around this time. I wish there was some sort of standardized size for these things! It is tedious resizing the images all the time. It is a good thing I never tire of looking at the horses I create!

Cheers,
Susan
windhorseOne Studios
www.windhorseone.com

Monday, April 6, 2009

Meet Blue


Blue is a medicine hat paint that lives at the Medicine Horse Program facility in Boulder. The medicine hat is an unusual pattern where most of the horse's body is white, but the ears and around the entire top of the head is brown, black or roan. The horse looks like he has a hat on. Legend has it that Native American tribes, especially Plains tribes, called the spot a "Medicine Hat" or "war bonnet".

I took a fancy to him and had the opportunity to have an equine facilitated learning session with him last week. He is 2 1/2 years old and quite the looker.

He was a PMU foal that was brought to Medicine Horse and was saved from slaughter. PMU (pregnant mares urine) is used to make Premarin, a woman's hormone replacement drug. The foals are yanked prematurely from their mothers so that the mares can be bred again.

The program at Medicine Horse is called HopeFoal; at risk young girls are paired with these orphaned foals and both are given an opportunity to thrive. How beautiful is that?!!!

Thanks for reading!
Susan
windhorseOne Studios
www.windhorseone.com

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Adventures of Kairos and Zephyr: Class Portrait


We have been back to winter months with 18" of snow the other day and about 12" last night. Kairos turned one on April 1st. What an appropriate birthday for him!

Believe it or not Kairos and Zephyr managed to jump out of this paddock. They did take down two rails with them but still! They left poor Scooter inside running around while they had a bit of a gad about.

Some days they say two is company and three is a crowd but they seem to be all getting along here.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Medicine Horses; Equine Experiential Learning

I just finished a week long equine experiential learning program at Medicine Horse Program in Boulder Colorado. Their mission is to enhance the mental health and life skills of youth, adults, families, and groups through therapeutic interaction with horses.

The six day program (EFLC Level One training) was taught by Kathy Pike, founder of Coaching With Horses. She is an Epona certified instructor and also a career coach from Carbondale CO. Kathy is also a co-founder and one of the ten co-authors in my new book Horse as Teacher: The Path to Authenticity Through Horses.

All I can say is wow! The transformational power and magic of the horse to teach and heal is nothing short of amazing. One of the powerful tools I learned was how to use my senses like a horse. I left the workshop feeling as though new doors had been opened. One of my goals was to deepen my connection to horses and transfer it to my art. Lets see what happens!

Have a great weekend!
Susan
windhorseone Studios
www.windhorseone.com