Not Furlong

Description

A furlong is not for long when you’re breezing a race horse. Holiday money as children, jump on the back of the horses in the stalls as they need training. ‘Just hold on’ they said. For others, we were pedestrians behind a tractor throwing bales on lazy trailers. You’re young not furlong.

This is a great image for the wall as you walk into the office.

This exhibition was a special one. Laura’s dad was the conductor of the Royal Symphony Orchestra in the 1980s. He passed away in 1994, and I wanted to somehow combine his musical genius with Laura’s love for horses. In 2016, I created a limited edition series of 12 sketches on Laura’s father’s original sheet music called Equestrian Rhythms. At the time of this exhibition, Laura was amidst a horse rescue mission of mass proportion. She had discovered that horses she had once cared for before moving to the UK and working at Chasemore were being abused and starved on a farm in our Kwa-Zulu Natal Midlands area. She and a team at our local horse care unit managed to eventually confiscate the animals, and Laura subsequently owns one of them. Sadly as a result of the abuse he is blind, but we are teaching him to be a horse again.

This exhibition speaks to all disciplines in horse riding but has also been a means for us to raise funds for the rescue unit that helped save the horses from starvation. Since the exhibition started in 2016, for each print that is sold, a bag of horse food is purchased for the unit.