Twenty-Two Horses, Stags and Bison

Valentina DuBasky draws on her experiences in India through the Fulbright Specialist Program, as well as her travels to see ancient art, cave sites, painted temple walls, and groups of petroglyphs along the Silk Route in China, India, Central Asia and Southeast Asia to create this exciting series of horse, stag and bison paintings.

Painted with thick impasto oil paint, and positioned on the edge of abstraction, DuBasky’s paintings can be read as animal, still life, landscape or abstraction. Brush marks painted on or within layers of thick paint, or incised into plaster, allow the surface to become a strata that both reveals and conceals the images. The relationships between myth and form, and between totemic art and the unconscious mind, guide the artist’s process. (22 color plates)

The animals seem to evoke something totemic–a taproot to the first art created on cave walls. I could not help but think that these animals have been with us for a long time. They have accompanied us on our collective, human journey from the caves to the present. In our own time, horses, stags and bison still enter our imagination mythically, bringing a sense of wonder, power and delight. – Valentina DuBasky