When I was 2 years old my father worked as a salesman at a Kresge’s department store. We only had one car, and when my mother and I would pick him up from work, I would invariably make a beeline for the Wonder Horse floor model, a plastic bouncy horse with a fancy Western saddle and a cream colored coat. I have no memory of this, but my parents still remember me screaming and laughing ecstatically, and even though they had no money to spare, they bought the Wonder Horse for me that Christmas. It is the first thing I ever fell in love with, and it was the beginning of a passionate obsession with horses that lasted all the way until college when, after years of collecting Breyer model horses, reading every horse book I could find, and finally owning horses myself, I moved away from home and my beloved horses. All the time that I had dedicated to riding was transferred to studying art, but the Wonder Horse is still on my front porch, and that deep and mysterious love for horses continues to hold a prominent place in my heart and in my psyche.
My love for horses is my purest and most central expression of my love for this world, so when I began drawing horses dropping from great heights, it was more than a beautiful disaster. It was a dress rehearsal for losing everything I care about and learning how to live with it.
The drawings from the Any Minute Now series show horses flailing in a space devoid of reference to landscape or narrative. They are captured in a terrible moment of free fall at an undisclosed distance from impact and certain doom. Each drawing feels like I am killing something I love. The laborious and repetitive gesture of mark making which slowly builds each image is my form of Maranasati, the Buddhist meditation practice that uses visualization to meditate on the nature of death. – Larassa Kabel