The Journey of the Red Horse: Horse and Stag Paintings

Valentina DuBasky’s modern-day cave-wall paintings of horses, stags and birds explore the correspondences between ancient art and the contemporary imagination. Totemic animals are juxtaposed with petroglyphs and plants that appear and fade within layers of paint to suggest a natural ecosystem in which all life is interdependent. In some of the paintings, a single-image of a horse, stag or bison is pitched on the edge of abstraction and can be read as animal, abstraction, landscape or still life. The paintings are inspired by the artist’s travels along the Silk Route in China, India, Central Asia and Southeast Asia, where she researched Buddhist cave paintings and ancient art to prepare for her own modern-day, cave-wall paintings. DuBasky follows the link of the animals from their source in ancient art along a continuum that stretches from cave paintings to figurative expressionism. (13 color plates)