Mandy van Leeuwen: "We did this on crezone panels in the studio. Charlie (the client)
said 'I want running horses through water in a mountain setting'. We found various
pictures of horses and used them as reference photos and put them into this layout, this
whimsical mountain setting with the sunrise and a free-spirited feel. We called it
Charlie's Angels because he has an extreme love of horses. To me it's a sweet picture for
a sweet man-when you work for someone you kind of put those feelings into the painting
and I think it shows here."
Jennifer Johnson Pollock: "I finally got to do my horses; it was exciting! Crezone is a
smoother surface so it's less forgiving: you need to have those crisp lines and I have to
work with your shading a little bit more. Charlie could really decide what kind of horses
that he wanted except that he liked Clydedales which is a heavy horse; so we decided to
go with four heavy horses. And the water, most horses love running through water! The
Clydesdale is the horse on the right; next to it we have a Haflinger. The brown horse in
front of it is a Belgian; and the horse at the front is a Percheron. All Percherons are born
black; some of them turn grey some of them stay black. Some of them develop the
dapples (spots) like this one on its rear end. These are all heavy horses. Their weight
ranges from 1500 to 2200 pounds whereas an average horse is 1000 to 1200
pounds."
"It was also sort of an ode to the eighties with the background sky reminiscent of those
black velvet paintings! Not quite as gaudy, but the colours are there. I was just excited
to have the opportunity to do it because of the differences in the horses and being able to
get the characteristics: the Belgian has kind of a Roman nose, the Clydesdale is more
square, and some of the Percheron's characteristics are a little bit more refined but still
have that very thick neck."
