Horses in the suburbs

Edge of the Suburbs 11x14 oil on canvas, NFS now

Nothing I worked on this week is "ready for prime time" yet, but here's another one from two months ago that I did for the "Rural Remants" show in a few months.I like to "expose my secrets" because I'm always wondering how other artists put a composition together or capture an interesting gesture or animal. This one was mostly from one photo, but I cut out one of the palm trees and a blue trash can in the lower right,  made the horse more orange and more sway back because I liked the curve, and I inserted the man raking from another photo because I wanted to pull the eye a little away from the horse. I made the dark horizontal boards darker because I liked that repeated design of the rails, steps and windows.
I was drawn to this shot because I liked the buildings in the background and, yes, that's the distant 118 freeway in a diagonal in the upper left. I didn't want them to be real obvious, but I wanted them there in spirit in order to balance the old rural feel we think is peaceful with the traffic and hustle we struggle with. Life is complicated, and I try to include a bit of that reality into most of my paintings.