r—Horse house
Equestrian history
comes alive in art
By JOCK HATFIELD
Of the Emerald
There’s something about the horse that inspires artistic
interpretation. Anything as big and stupid looking as the horse
has got to be up to something metaphysical on the side.
The Bible has a lot to say about horses. Psalms in particu
lar warns us about the horse’s motives: “A horse is counted
but a vain thing to save a man; neither shall he deliver any man
by his great strength.”
Out on the McKenzie Highway, Martha Shelly has filled up
a house with horses. Horses, as Shelly tells it, have had an
almost mystical influence on her life. She uses horses as
chronologists use history. She credits many of the accom
plishments of her family to the help of the horse. Different
horses symbolize different epochs in her family’s progress.
Visitors to the House of Horses receive a lengthy horse
lecture. In 26 years of carving, Shelly has enough horses to
start a miniature stampeed and a dude ranch. She has grouped
together the carvings in shadow boxes to depict great mo
ments from her family’s horse history. These moments oc
cured on her father’s ranch near Hepner, Ore. and her late
husband's ranch in Montana. There was the time a bear
chased a relative up a tree while the horse stayed below to
deal with the problem. She tells of the horse’s sufferings under
the bridle and of horses leading the way home in the dark.
“We did everything with horses in those days,” she says.
The first horses came to America with Cortez, had a few
good massacres and spread themselves around the country.
They caught on.
Half of the House of Horses is filled with Shelly’s paint
ings. Most of these paintings are busts of horses, but Shelly
also dabbles in religion.
She has a painting of the four horsemen of the
Apocalypse, who had biblical dealings with plague and disas
ter.
Some of her paintings were inspired by the horse stories
of her visitors. One visitor told her of a ranch in Nebraska
where everything was white. White chickens, white rabbits,
white houses, white horses and white people. Things were
going along happily until the father in the family died, and the
family had to break uo its white monopoly to pay the bills. The
horses were split up and carted off to sundry tragic places.
Shelly captured this in a painting of eight white dynamic horses
galloping around like cumulus clouds, titled “approaching
storm.”
“My paintings are inspired," says Shelly. “They come to
me full blown and I feel pressured until I do it." A painting of a
hand being helped out of a sea by a horse was bumping
around in her head for months, she says, before she finally
tossed it onto canvas.
Shelly’s carvings, she says, lie in the wood waiting to be
brought out. There is a lot of excavating in art.
“This boy is still in there,” she says holding an unfinished
fat carving.
Shelly had broken in a thousand horses or so when 26
Photo by Erich Boekelheide
Horses have been more than just animals to Martha
Shelly. She uses them as a historian uses historic events.
Horses have spent a lot of time in Shelly's family. That’s why
she spends a great deal other time carving the huge animals.
years ago her doctor told her she would have to give them up.
Shelly sees her carving as a loophole. She kept in touch with
horses by making them in her sick bed.
"Praise the lord,” she says. “There was a subject I knew
thoroughly."
She carves each horse as though it were going to come
alive. A muscle placed a fraction of an inch out of line could
make the horse into a cripple or give it digestion problems.
“When I finish a horse," she says, “I want to be able to say
walk trot or canter and have it be able to do it without leaving
behind a part."
“Nothing you see now will be on the final work.”
Shelly first picked up her appreciation of horses when a
buyer for her father’s ranch took her out to help match horses
for the family’s team. Horses had to be matched by size,
weight and muscular stature. Until this time, Shelly had re
garded the horse as a horse. Then she began to look at it as a
collection of parts, a work of art.
Shelly’s work reflects this background. Her horses are
suggestive of symbolism, strength and sex. They show the
horse as something more than uncooked dogfood.
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