Race Horses before the Stands

I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey. - Edgar Degas

This painting has a wonderful sense of space and air. You can almost feel the sun as it washes a late afternoon light across all. The use of negative space is nice, all that blank track in the middle of the painting broken by slanting shadows and the one jockey & horse. The slight tilt of the jock's head, glancing at the crowd, is a nice touch.

Degas used the horse, and racing in particular, as a frequent motif. Like his dancer paintings, his interest lay more in the time that surrounds "the big moment". Here the time before the race, the jocks are settling themselves and their horses, saving their energy.

Bolting Horse

To be able to translate the customs, ideas and appearance of my times as I see them – in a word, to create a living art – this has been my aim. - Gustave Courbet

Courbet was part of a movement called "the Realists". This could seemed odd to all of us living in this time of say abstract art but his take on realist painting was more a social one. He painted what he saw, he knew, tenets I strive to do. He painted the so-called ordinary as he would any subject without the sentimentality that such genre paintings usually possess.