Mimi Torchia Boothby

When I paint a horse, it isn’t just a horse. The horse represents a feeling. Horses are very expressive animals, they express joy, anger, fear, frivolity, power. A challenge for me as an artist is to show that feeling in the horse’s posture. I have been drawing horses since I was a small child. I’m not sure when I moved from trying to draw a horse, to trying to portray feelings in drawings of horses, but I’d say it happened about the time that I reached adulthood. As you confront my horse paintings, try and feel what they exhibiting. Then, you’ve got it.
This painting is 16″ x 24″ in size. The colors did not reproduce well, the yellow background in real life is a lot more fun.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, but be assured, I am painting and sketching. I have been working on horses, trotting, walking, galloping, jumping. Since I live in a big city, far, far away from horses, I have been relying on a book full of horse photographs taken in the 1800’s in a government funded study on animal locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge. The horses are all named. My favorites are the draft horses, and Hansel is one of them.