Stalking Horse

Condensing the entirety of humankinds’ depiction of a horse
into a single picture was not initially my aim but eventually became the result
of much research, cognitive leaps, intuitive thinking, coincidence and good old
dumb luck.

In the summer and early autumn of 2022, I visited many
places in the UK during the filming of Landscape Artist of the Year which
happily I won. After many years living abroad this was several months of
rediscovery of the British landscape. At every turn, such that it felt like a
recurrent good omen, I encountered white horses; in the Shropshire Hills on my
way to the first heat of the show a running herd of wild white horses emerged
from the fog. Indeed, the location of my interview having won the competition
was outside White Horses Cottage in Port Merion.

A strong case could be made that The White Horse is the
emblem of England. There was a proposal acknowledging this some years ago for a
monumental scale sculpture by Mark Wallinger to be erected at Ebbsfleet in
Kent. And while this sculpture; an ‘angel
of the south’ was not ultimately realised the idea of an image of a white horse,
drawing as it did from the iconography of the many figures of horses carved
into the chalk downs of southern England, stuck with me such that during that
summer of 2022 it became a personal touchstone.

Quite unplanned, and with much good fortune, I have been
based in Dorset since 2023 first just below Hambledon Hill and Hodd Hill (a
pair of chalk-down hill-forts just beyond Cranbourne Chase proper) and since
the beginning of 2024 below Bulbarrow Hill and Rawlsbury Camp at Woolland House
(the former home of Dame Elisabeth Frink).

As is my custom I walk and explore frequently on hills;
these being the best way to get far from the madding crowds. With the vague
idea of trying to record my now semi-personal mythology of the white horse and
having used found and sourced materials for many years (especially charcoal
from forest fires) I picked up some pieces of white chalk and while I didn’t
shout ‘eureka’ to use the white chalk of
England to depict a white horse of England couldn’t, I thought, be more
appropriate. This notion simmered away among the myriad ideas I always have
developing at various rates until late 2025. I was at an opening and chatting
to the artist Rob Adams and I happened to mention my plan for a huge painting
of vultures. He just happened to have a 10-meter roll of linen that he said he
didn’t have use for as he now painted on a small scale on panel and asked if I
could make use of it. He also happened to have a huge stretcher he said he was
never going to use. This simple, off-hand act of generosity from one artist to
another set me on a course which has in large part lead to my new way of
working which you now see in ‘Kinship’.

For several years I had been trying to find a way to apply
my drawing methods and draughtsmanship skills in my painting practice while
still making paintings in oil. I tried to use the forest fire charcoal on canvas,
but it is both tricky and unsatisfactory and never really work as I wanted it
to. I now also had the chalk and the intention of making a white horse and chalk
really didn’t work on canvas. The linen Rob had given me was then used in the
normal way for the Tower of Silence; I stretched the oil primed linen and
painted on the ‘correct’ side.

As I was nearing completion of that piece, I saw a post online
about a painting from the Dutch Golden Age by Paulus Potter of a white horse
with dark spots entitled ‘The Piebald Horse’ (1650 – 54). This triggered a
memory of seeing the cave paintings in France; the Peche Merle of horses with
dark spotted markings which are possibly the earliest depictions of horses by
humankind made circa 25,000 years ago. I knew that the horses of Peche Merle
were not Przewalski’s Horse as I had looked at depicting these some years
before as they are often thought to be the nearest breed to the prototypical
wild horse and have become the accepted archetype of ancient horses since they
are more frequently to be seen in cave paintings.

I delved into further research.

Years before I had read David W. Anthony’s landmark book ‘The
Horse, The Wheel and Language’ (2007) in which the timeline for the
domestication of the horse on the Eurasian steppes is established. I also knew
that throughout the history of civilization from the agricultural revolution to
the industrial revolution, indeed on to the very cusp of the digital revolution
horses had provided the means for humankind’s domination over nature, providing
us with power and prosperity, rapid transport and military might. The image of a man on a horse became the
symbol of this power and control and equestrian statuary the pinnacle, the ne
plus ultra expression of it. The Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius (Rome, CE
175) is perhaps the model upon which all subsequent Emperors, Kings and Rulers,
when seeking to demonstrate their insuperable power, based their depiction.

A specific type of horse came to define the horse of all
horses in these depictions and statuary during the 16th and 17th centuries ‘Age
of Absolutism’. The leopard spot coated horses originating in ancient horses in
Austria came to be the breed of horse which, particularly via the Habsburgs,
the emblem of dominion.

Horses had become extinct in the Americas by the end of the
Pleistocene epoch circa 10-12,000 years ago but when the Spanish Conquistadors
arrived there they did so with horses. Today there are countless statues of
Cortes, Pizarro and Ponce de Leon throughout the Americas. Some of these horses
were white horse with dark spots.

Gradually the spotted horse faded from view as fashions
changed in favour of a more uniform grey (white) coat and by arrival of the
second wave arrival of Arabian horses under the aegis of the Ottomans.

Meanwhile across the
ocean and through the tangled and problematic history of the colonization of
the Americas the horse transformed native societies. In North America the horse
was so perfectly matched to the prairies and suited to the habitat that we
can’t imagine that they were ever absent from it nor being ridden across it by yes,
cowboys, more so in fact by Native Americans. The history of the trading,
breeding, training and use of horses by Native American tribes I have only
dipped a little into during my research, however what did become clear to me
when searching for spotted horse breeders in the UK (there are very few and I
was looking to visit to take reference photo’s without much luck)…is that those
two or three that did bred Spanish Spotted Saddle Horses (SSSH) and more often bred
only Appaloosas. I knew this second breed’s name from my time living in the US
but not it’s history which is both fascinating and satisfyingly circular
particularly regarding the growing scope of my ‘horse project’:

When Lewis and Clark, during their expedition, arrived in
what is now Wyoming they came across the Nez Perce who had over time become an
equestrian people and some of those horses were what came to be known as
Appaloosas. The contemporary SSSH is a modern breed arrived at in part by the
introduction of American Appaloosa bloodlines and has been revived in Europe by
the reintroduction of this ancient bloodline carried forth by the Nez Perce.

As a child bought up on programmes such as James Burke’s ‘Connections’
series of documentaries I love this stuff.

Now, with chalk and charcoal in hand, the intention to
depict a white horse with spots and with the determination to synthesise my
drawing and painting practices, I began to experiment on the linen I had been
given. I quickly found that if I reversed the linen, I had a surface with just
the right amount of ‘tooth’ to hold thus powdery material and just the right
amount of absorbency for the oil to be workable both in washes and wetter
applications of paint. It was also perfect for scumbling. Since the linen was
oil primed on the reverse the work would also be permanent and have an entirely
matt finish (light reflections on paint are the bane of a painter’s life). Another benefit that when working at scale is
that it is better to tack the material it to a flat wall and a pre primed linen
will not distort once it is moved to a stretcher once finished. In all I had
developed a new way to work that unified and balanced my drawing and painting
methods.

With much of the research in place and a plethora of
reference material I moved to what I call the composition phase and asked
myself: what is the posture of the horse and why, should there be a background
and if so, how might that change the meaning of the piece? There was also ‘the
horse in the room’ imprinted upon my visual memory: since my first visit to the
National Gallery long ago: ‘Whistlejacket’ (1762) loomed over this project. My
intention was always that my horse had to be life size (all my animal
portraiture is life size for reasons I outline in the essay Anima, Animus,
Animal and is evident in the other works in ‘Kinship’) and as such I could not
ignore Stubbs’ masterpiece.

One can, and always will find, precedents if one looks for
them - and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere my aim is always to address both the
entirety of art and cultural history and the contemporary moment while
folding in the personal/ biographical to arrive at a unified synthesis that the
work embodies and exemplifies. If I was to depict my horse life size
comparisons would be inevitable and unavoidable so I decided to address the
issue head on and reference ‘Whistlejacket’ directly but obliquely: similar
enough in scale and in mood but entirely different. I wanted a pose that
referenced all those grand Emperor on a horse painting such as Jaques Louis
David’s ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’ but that undermined the power on display
and emphasised the nobility of the horse not the rider.

The expression of Whistlejacket was I thought far too close
to that David’s mount and of most rearing horses. I wanted an expression that
is direct and calm, in control but not fearful or aggressive. Nor should it be
too passive. I thought about how in all my paintings of animals or birds there
is in their eyes a searching quality. I think this is the result of the eyes
being, well, my own. I’ve always wanted my creatures to look at the viewer as I
look while painting –to be caught in the act of looking with attentive attention
and again not watchful or wary, just Looking.

This aspect of depiction and its’ meaning is discussed by
Hans Belting in his last book; ‘Face and Mask: A Double History’ (2017). In the
book Belting says that we are all wearing a mask or series of masks all of the
time. While I think it is partly true that ‘all portraits are self-portraits’ I
think Belting’s idea is closer to the truth that all portraits are a series of
masks or ‘maskings’: The one the sitter is wearing as they pose, the mask the
artist sees the sitter wearing (what the artist sees may have no correlation to
the sitters mask), the mask the artist interprets from this exchange and sets
down on the canvas, and the mask the artist superimposes upon and imprints
within the image – his reflection seen in this hall of mirrors. Now, I set all
this down to elucidate something that viewers of my work always mention; ‘the
eyes!” and to outline what is happening in the eye contact between the viewer
and the painted depiction, how the sense of recognition comes about, how
communication and therefore kinship is felt. The horse is not a horse
nor is it alive and yet there is a presence.

The Spanish Riding School. In seeking a pose that was a
little reminiscent of Whistlejacket insofar as the horse is, while engaged in
an interrupted movement, noticing the viewer and in wanting a pose that was
obviously the posture of a horse with the rider removed I reviewed a fair
amount of dressage moves and terminology while I watched the Lipizzaner horses
being put through their paces in Vienna. The Levade it quickly became clear
embodied all the aspects I was looking for: the Levade is an Alta Escuela
movement where the horse takes its weight on dropped haunches while dropping
the quarters and raises its shoulders so that the back is at an angle of up to
35 degrees with forelegs tucked in.

My normal process of the visual aspects of composition – the
moving toward the form of the piece- follows a long-practiced methodology the
aim of which is to create a ‘cartoon’ of the exact image - formed through
research in my mind- from which to work and to execute the painting. This
‘cartoon’ often takes the form of a composite, photoshop image, drawn from
layers of my sketches and photo reference, and these can take a long time to
put together, to match. For example, the cartoon for ‘Towers of Silence’ took
2-3 weeks to complete. Thereafter, and for many years I would then transpose
the cartoon to the canvas using the age-old method of ‘gridding up’. This too
can be a very slow process never mind the actual painting; plotting points on
the canvas from one’s reference one by one, millimetre by millimetre and I had
long grown tired of doing so and never had an assistant or apprentice to
delegate the work to as the old masters used to. Towards the end of 2025 I grew
sick of this plodding, archaic process and bought myself a projector with which
I could project my cartoon onto the canvas and quickly sketch in the image
using water soluble pencils which I could erase with cotton buds as I
progressed with the painting in oil. This sped up my work immeasurably, but, I
thought, it could be faster.

At this juncture, and with huge reservations and instinctive
reluctance, I had the third ‘eureka moment’ of my artistic career. The first was my invention of ‘digital
etching’ when an illustrator, the second was the use of forest fire charcoal to
depict the conflagration of the environment, and the third was the use in the
composition of this painting that you now see before you of … A.I.

I have fretted and worried about disclosing that I used A.I.
to help compose this painting but I now realise that my instincts to do so are
correct for one over-riding reason which is intrinsic to the understanding of
this painting.

As I’ve stated frequently and often, I am an artist engaged
with the entirety of art history and with the contemporary moment
simultaneously. Stylistically I eschew all tricks, all gimmicks and all cynical
fads and modes of representation. My paintings could be filed under ‘Realism’
or ‘Surrealism’ and while they are certainly ‘Representational’ insofar as they
look like the thing depicted, they are, at least visually, not ‘abstracted’ but
absolutely and demonstrably conceptual. If I belong to any kind of school in
the narrow and diminished judgement of critics it could be that I am a realist
painter insofar as I am an artist concerned with the image rather than the
painted surface – not especially concerned nor engaged with the quality of
paint upon the support, with paint’s materiality. I do have ‘painterly’ aspects
to my work, but I do not wield nor trowel on the paint in an ‘artistic’ manner
– that for me is a mannerism. Neither am I an issue or identity-based painter
and I do not subscribe to these reductive tropes whereby exposition equates to
the relevance and cultural value and therefore artistic value of the work.

This much I know; I am a bit of an anomaly. I draw strength
and companionship from a small group of artists who I perceive I have an
affinity with, who are operating in a similar manner. These are people whose
work, in years to come, critics might congratulate themselves to have
discovered and to have bought to public attention but for the time being they are
artists who for the most part are unheralded. Being popular is and has never
been the aim. Making cogent, relevant and well considered art is the driver.

After a lifetime of making art in various but predominantly
visual forms utilising all the available tools (digital included) - and indeed
having lost not one, but two careers – the first in music, the next as an
illustrator to ‘technology’ I assumed as I moved back to painting, to fine art
that at the very least painting in oil was safe from ‘the robots’ as a valued
practice, the continuation and epitome of the apex of human expression but the
robots are relentless pursuivants. If there is any lesson to be drawn from
Joseph Campbell’s writings it is this: turn and face the monster. The seemingly
ever-growing monster of the contemporary moment is A.I. It will, it is assumed,
devour all before it.

I said to myself:
fuck that, I will not allow digital technology to supersede me as an
artist, as a creator for the third time and so I resolved to make the damn robot
work for me. I did not have the stomach nor indeed the time to dissect
horses to understand their anatomy the better to depict one accurately in the
manner and pose I wanted but I could use A.I. as a tool to do so. And this was
my third eureka moment: by using A.I. as
an anatomically correct compositional tool I could connect and encapsulate
within one painting the entirety of humankind’s methods of depiction from the
cave to A.I.

What you see before you is precisely as I describe: an Ur-horse
that is painted and represented in the most archaic manner using charcoal and
chalk on a wall. It is simultaneously a cave painting and functions, as the
title clearly states, as a false flag: a representation behind which lurks a
predator, the parasite that is A.I. which we have loosed upon ourselves.

‘Stalking Horse’ is then simultaneously a summation, an
embodiment, a warning and constitutes encapsulation of the forces we have
called forth and depicted throughout our collective history.

N.b. A.I. was not used in the composition of this text.