Day Dreams

Whenever I'm on a long car trip and not the one driving I have the same fantasy. I imagine a horse running at breakneck speed alongside the car.

Not right alongside, further off in the distance, but it keeps pace with us. Leaping fences and creeks, weaving in between trees...

I've done it for as long as I can remember. Perhaps as a way to ease boredom. It's a bright sorrel (red, that is). Sometimes there are other horses but he's always out front. Next up behind him is a palomino paint mare, and the rest of the herd is brightly colored with paints and appys and buckskins all manes and tails flying.

I had trouble for a while just recently. My interest and background in animation has had me analyzing the way things move. The animators in Jurassic Park used cheats to make the T-Rex move at 25 mph because it didn't look right. The same with my horse that used to run 60+ mph easily. Now he still runs, but pushed back in the distance in a kind of never ending cinematic pan.

I will share something that very few people get to see. When I was small, about ten, I drew a mare, bright red with a black mane and tail. Her head was too small, and her legs had too many joints, but I thought it was the best drawing I had ever done. I'm still rather proud of her actually. I named her Hurricane Janet, and she formed the foundation for a new breed of racehorses. I called them "Superior Breds," a weak pun on thoroughbred. The first few were pretty thoroughbredy, but I brought in Appaloosas and paints to create a super flashy brightly colored horse. Then I decided began bringing in draft horses to give them feathering and bulk. I kept track of their bloodlines and made crosses back and forth to make sure that the breed stayed pure to itself but could still continue to improve.

I have two notebooks full of hundreds of drawings that (in general) get progressively better. Each one is labeled with its name, gender, and parentage. I kept the thing up for years, well into college. I haven't added to it for a couple years now, but that doesn't mean I'm done.

Mostly I'm glad that I've kept them all. Some of the drawings are pretty awful, and there are a couple that I decided were bad enough that they should be removed from the gene pool, and this is noted on their pages, but I never got rid of a single drawing. I don't have very much of my early artwork, but I'm glad I've held on to my horses.