I tagged along. 😉
LONGINES GLOBAL CHAMPIONS TOUR · LONDON
FOUR PAINTINGS WENT TO LONDON.
They ended up at the Longines Global Champions Tour London, displayed with Espayo, while some of the most extraordinary horses and riders in the world competed just a few steps away.
For someone who spends most of her days painting horses from a studio in Michigan, this was a pretty spectacular change of scenery.
And, yes. A little surreal.
FIRST, THEY HAD TO GET THERE.
Four paintings. Four frames. One very carefully packed box.
Handing my work over to an airline for a trip across the Atlantic required a certain amount of optimism. And perhaps a little denial. (Thank you Delta!)
But there it was at Heathrow.
An inspection sticker. A few new battle scars. And, thankfully, still very much in one piece.
London, we made it.
There is something completely different about seeing your work hanging in the middle of the world that inspired it.
Horses everywhere. Riders walking past. Competition happening just a few steps away. And my four paintings, hanging there with Espayo in the middle of it all.
People stopped. They looked closely. They talked about the horses and the paintings.
And one of my favorite things?
They took selfies with them.
I can't tell you how much fun it was to watch people stop, pull out their phones, and take pictures of themselves standing in front of my work.
Every once in a while, someone would simply say:
“What a beautiful painting. And more than once, that was followed by some version of, “Can you paint mine?”
That's a pretty wonderful thing for an artist to hear.
Especially in a place filled with some of the most extraordinary horses and riders in the world.
For a few days in London, my paintings got to be part of that world too...before they found their permanent homes with their riders in the UK and South Africa.
AND THEN THERE THEY WERE.
Each painting started the same way my commissioned portraits do: with photographs.
From there, I build the composition, expression, background, color and all those tiny details that make a horse unmistakably that horse.
Not a copy of one photograph.
Not a button-click AI transformation.
A painting created one decision at a time.
And seeing these four together in London made me think about where I wanted my equestrian work to go next.
THE FOUR THAT MADE THE TRIP
And here's the thing about competition photographs: they're fantastic at capturing the action. The rider's expression? Sometimes not so much. 😉
That's one of the reasons I love creating from multiple photographs. I can keep that incredible jump—and give her back the expression everyone actually recognizes.
Because I'm all about the happy, pretty version. (My clients are too!)
Standing there in London, surrounded by extraordinary horses was one thing.
But I kept watching the riders, too.
The trust between them. The communication. The way horse and rider seemed to know what the other was thinking before either one made a move.
I love painting horses. I always will.
But I became even more fascinated by what happens when you put the person who loves that horse into the painting too.
Because then it isn't only a portrait of a horse.
It's a portrait of a relationship.