Whoa!
18×24
Oil on Stretched Canvas

Today is it! The first day of two days now known as the Breeder’s Cup. This year’s Cup is being held at historic and beautiful Santa Anita Race Track in Arcadia, California.

Today is Ladies’ Day. Races today are the Filly & Mare Sprint, Juvenile Filly Turf, Juvenile Filly, Filly & Mare Turf and the Ladies Classic.

The rest of the Breeder’s Cup schedule follows on Saturday.

I haven’t seen a Breeder’s Cup Race live in several years due first to a Saturday working schedule and, more recently, to the fact that coverage has moved off network TV and onto cable and we have never had cable. (Before you start feeling too badly for me, I’ll tell you that’s by choice. We already have so much going on that there is no time for TV of any kind. Our TV is pushed into a corner and has not been watched, turned on or even dusted in many, many weeks. No great loss, let me tell you!).

I will be monitoring the races online, however. My favorite site for doing so is The Blood-Horse.com, but there are also other places to read about the races and to watch them. The really neat thing is that I can watch the part I really want to see (the races) without wading through all the wagering information (about which I don’t care a fig) or the inane interviews (which quite frequently make me long for the Good Ol’ Days when indepth profiles of the people AND horses involved were among my favorite parts of racing coverage).

In honor of today’s events, I’m presenting Whoa! to you. It is the fourth of four oil paintings featuring horse racing that I currently have.

The theme of this painting is not the race itself, but the challenge of bringing hot-blooded race horses to a stop afterward. My subjects for this painting are Quarter Horses, but any race horse will do.

These horses have just run the fastest 350 yards of their lives. Adrenaline is pumping, they are not ready to give up the race just yet. Especially not with competitors still eyeball to eyeball!

But the finish line has been reached and after that, well, the horses have to stop. Whether they want to or not.

During my years in Michigan, I tried to visit Mt. Pleasant Meadows. I liked to photograph racing action near the wire. At the small track in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan where I took most of my hundreds of racing reference photos, positioning myself near the wire also allowed me to photograph stretch runs, the run around the first turn, post parades and unsaddling without moving more than a few yards. If I walked a little further, I could also see the saddling paddock and the walk from the backstretch.

I always enjoy reviewing shots of the action at this track, but the photographs that led to this painting were a surprise. The tension between the horses’ forward momentum and the backward pull of the jockeys as they throw their weight against the reins and into the stirrups is part of the dynamics and drama that immediately attracted me. The dual between forward momentum and sudden, unyielding restraint was also too much to ignore. It is a part of the sport.

The fact that I also have shots of these three as they pounded toward the wire and almost from the start of the race only add dimension. For me, at least.

And I can look back at those photographs, taken in 1995, and know that the three horses were, foreground to background, Kentucky Boy Floyd, Pacific Teddy Bear and Easy Azer Repete. The six images I have show them battling tooth and nail for almost the entire stretch. There are, I think, some energetic paintings among those other shots, too.

Whoa! is available unframed for $1,050 or framed for $1,300 to the first buyer. Custom framing is also available upon request.

All of my horse racing art can be seen on my web site by clicking on the links to Horse Racing Art or Michigan Harness Horse Art.

©Copyright 2008 by Carrie Lewis. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Carrie Lewis’s website.