White Horse Rider

INTERIOR PAINTING, Oil on canvas, 16 x 12″.

This painting is an actual memory of riding a very large white horse which I eventually fell off of while galloping at full speed. I was small at the tyme, and had never been on a galloping horse. He was a beautiful horse, all white, large and fast, generally acknowledged to be the fastest horse on that farm. I included a Roman-type background with lots of color -in this sense I am a ‘man of color’- and the blindfold to indicate my (and your) general cluelessness as a human being.

Strangely, he had a feminine name, Nora, which riffs nicely off the horse as symbol for the soul, its feminine and masculine aspects. So we were returning to the farm after having been out most of the day. We were a fairly large group, hot and sweatty all – in a movie, we might have constituted the posse’ which is going to get its revenge. At some point my sister and brother took off like rockets, they had agreed to race the rest of the way back. Nora saw this, and inside her own soul decided that no one was going to beat her back, and she took off like lightning. Taken completely unaware, I groped for the reigns, which were really long, and caught the very end of them. These I tried my best to pull back to stop Nora, but far as I tried to yank them back, there was still slack between the bit in her mouth and my little hands. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well, I think we’re looking at a major accident here…’ whereupon I fell off of the world’s greatest horse.

It struck me later that if I had opened myself up to Nora in some way at that moment when she had taken off, I might have stayed on her -I mean him- and completed that ride. The issue was ‘opening up’ to the soul, allowing oneself to be guided by it, not the other way around. But instead I fell off, gashed my chin horribly, and I still hold the mark.

When your soul takes off on you -and who knows when it will- are you ready to stay on it? That was the lesson, and I remember being so impressed by the fact as I looked up from my splattered position on the ground, Nora had come to an immediate halt, it really was important to her to know how I was. This painting, now in Houston, is dedicated to her for providing one of my great life memories.