Show Preview | Ethelinda

Santa Fe, NM
Manitou Galleries, October 2-November 1

Ethelinda, Like the Wind, oil, 52 x 66.

This story was featured in the October 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art October 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

PICTURE, FOR A moment, a free-spirited young girl riding her horse bareback in the mountains and along beaches, untethered and utterly in tune with the power of her four-legged companion. For Santa Fe, NM, artist Ethelinda, the scene paints a vivid picture of her own childhood growing up in Hawaii. Her memories of riding without a saddle, of watching her horse wade in the ocean tides, make her smile even now, decades later. “It was so freeing and fabulous,” she says.

It’s with that same love for freedom that Ethelinda approaches her large-scale oil paintings of the horse today, depicting the creature’s power and grace on canvases that immediately greet viewers with both their immensity and beauty. As many as two dozen new paintings of this nature go on view this month at Manitou Galleries’ Palace Avenue location, beginning with an artist’s reception on Friday, October 2, from 2 to 6 p.m. Simply titled Ethelinda, the solo exhibition is devoted completely to the horse and includes the artist’s popular portrayals of galloping equines carrying Native American-style feathers fashioned with rawhide thongs and beads.

Given their generally large size (works range from 30 by 36 inches to 72 by 52 inches), each composition is carefully planned out before Ethelinda puts paint to canvas. “There’s no one solution to putting these paintings together,” says the artist, who has completed “innumerable studies” of horses over the years. Photographs serve as a reference for equine anatomy and proportion, but the concepts for her compositions belong to Ethelinda. “I draw all the horses separately, cut them out, and then arrange them on my canvases,” she says.

The artist has portrayed various subjects over her long career, including still lifes of fruits and vegetables and portraits of Native Americans in authentic ceremonial clothing. Yet the horse has remained closest to her heart. While she doesn’t own horses today, the Santa Fean has formed friendships with local ranchers whose equine residents routinely appear in her paintings; among them is the dappled roan in AMERICANO ANDALUSIAN, his black mane made even more striking by his entirely white environs. Of this piece and several others in the show, says Ethelinda, “I’ve been portraying different horses from the side on a white background. I’ve just introduced the series this year, so this is a bit of a departure.”

With an eye for colorful patterning, Ethelinda is fond of decorating her horses with brightly painted handprints, stripes, and lightning bolts resembling the markings Native Americans historically painted on their own horses. Numerous works also reveal Ethelinda’s affinity for spotted horses like the rearing leopard Appaloosa in SHOW OFF. The feathers some of her horses carry add further splashes of patterning, and they’re useful for creating texture, an ingredient she also builds up in the coats of her horses and in their windswept manes and flowing tails. “It’s the beauty of oil paint,” says the artist, who uses brushes exclusively (palette knives are good for mixing paint and buttering toast, she jokes). “If you look closely at my paintings, some [horses] have a little star on their forehead,” says Ethelinda. “I always delineate that. There’s something about the horse that really benefits from that texture.” —Kim Agricola

contact information
505.986.0440
www.manitougalleries.com

Ethelinda, Feather Andalusian, oil, 48 x 66.

This story was featured in the October 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art October 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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