Introducing the Equine Art at HITS-on-the-Hudson

The HITS Saugerties LEGEND VIP Club will host the Equine! Equine! Equine! Annual Equine Festival’s art show through August 7. According to its Facebook invitation, the multi-artist show will depict “the beauty and essence of the horse through the interpretation of 8 renowned artists.” Equine! Equine! Equine! is the brainchild of Jeffrey Alan Cella, a Hudson Valley photographer who began the celebration of equine art at the Rhinebeck library four years ago. The show was so well received that the festival expanded to the Duchess County Fairgrounds in 2015, where music and performing arts joined the visual art on display.

This year, the festival calls HITS-on-the-Hudson home, surrounded on all sides by the human and equine athletes it celebrates through art. Cella envisions a festival that shows the public what it might not typically see about the world of horses. In that spirit, the exhibit is open to the public after 2:30 each day. Cella wants to remind viewers that horses have been a part of community and culture for almost all of history, and their impact on us has been both practical and transformative.

The show draws artists who are infatuated with the beauty of horses. Take, for example, artist Jean Haines. “I’ve been painting horses since birth,” she says, and this may well be true – she has created thousands of images of horses in her lifetime. “I’ve always loved horses for as long as I can remember and I’ve always drawn them,” she says.

Similarly, JoAnne Helfert Sullam started out painting horses, though she has since expanded to multiple forms of wildlife. “I always wanted a horse and since I didn’t have one, I painted one,” she laughs. When she was a child, she was inspired to participate in a drawing competition. Competitors were asked to replicate a drawing of a bulldog. When Sullam finished her drawing, the original and the replica were nearly identical – “that’s when I realized I could draw,” she says adding that, as she began to pursue this career, “People wanted to buy my work right away.” After moving to the Hudson Valley from Brooklyn, she converted a horse stall into a small personal studio. The stall’s original inhabitant, a curious horse, would often wander in to look around and she would often use him as a study for her paintings while he explored.

 

Sullam oversees the hanging of one of her paintings

 Tatiana Rhinevault, a native of Moscow, is also in love with the natural beauty of the Hudson Valley. She met her husband, an American, while he was making an English-language map of Moscow. She illustrated the map, falling in love in the process. All of her paintings hold this special kind of romance, especially her paintings of horses, animals she finds to be particularly beautiful subjects. The paintings on display at HITS Saugerties are oil, rather than her typical watercolor, so as to better weather outdoor conditions, and they depict horses in dramatically different styles with subjects drawn from anything from the civil war to classical mythology. Much of her work is done from her studio in Hyde Park, which, fittingly, is also a barn.

Rhinevault speaks with art enthusiasts

Catherine Sebastian, also an area native, is a photographer whose work at the exhibit documents a unique carousel in Missoula Montana. Sebastian found the carousel, which was created and donated by artist Chuck Kaparich, so remarkable that she spent two days photographing each horse. But with photography, she explains, “some things take fifteen minutes, some fifteen years.” She thought about the photographs and what she would do with them for some time. Sebastian considers the computer her darkroom, and post-production is very important to her. Finally, she realized that she wanted to work “in the realm of fantasy.” For children, she explains, “a carousel is the fantasy of riding. There’s pink dust in the air. And I wanted to put the pink dust in the print.” Her manipulations of the photographs, which are printed on clay-coated Hahnemuhle paper to make the colors even more vivid, epitomize the childhood magic of carousels. Each horse has a name and a backstory – they are named after horses lost by ranchers after a flood in Onion Creek, Texas. 

A carousel horse

Also represented at the exhibit are Leslie Bender, Andrew Halpern, Elizabeth E. McNeel, and Beth Dawson Vaculik. 20% of all sales go directly to Family of Woodstock. For more information about the show or to make an inquiry about sales, contact JAC Productions at (845) 417 6825.

WHERE: HITS-on-the-Hudson LEGEND VIP Club, 454 Washington Ave Ext, Saugerties

WHEN: Open to the public daily after 2:30pm