Even as a child growing up in Mountain Home, artist Samantha Sherry found herself obsessed with horses. Growing up around them, they began to frame her experiences… compassionately as family pets, competitively through rodeo, and academically in studying animal science. It wasn’t until Samantha found herself in Memphis without horses around her, however, that they began to (re)appear as her muse.
“My art is not just about drawing pretty horses,” Samantha says. “It is about commemorating and honoring the role they played in my past.” The large, sometimes abstract equine paintings that Samantha has become known for often are about her life experiences or are reflections of people who have influenced her.
“Outside of family, there isn’t a single thing that has impacted me more. Horses taught me discipline, patience, responsibility. Through horses, I have experienced a full range of emotion from deep disappointment and frustration to overwhelming joy and love. They gave me freedom and independence, successes and failures. They showed me the importance of empathy, compassion, commitment, teamwork, and the incredible power of non-verbal communication. Theirs is an influence so tightly woven into my personal development, it is imperceptible.”
The equine influence is easy for Samantha to explain and even understand, but the art is a bit more complicated. “Admittedly, I came to art later in my academic career than most so I had some growing pains, both technically and conceptually, but I grew up around strong creative women so I had great examples. My grandmother is a beautiful artist, and my mother is a fantastic designer and an incredible seamstress,” Samantha says.
At Mountain Home High School, Samantha earned the required art credit and continued at Arkansas State University Mountain Home, where she took another art class, just for fun. After transferring to ASU’s main campus in Jonesboro, where she was pursuing a degree in animal science, she enrolled in a painting course for non-majors. She realized then that she had found her second passion.
Making the call to her parents to say she had decided the art was becoming more of a dream for her than vet school was a tough one, she says.
“I was worried that my dad would think it was a crazy, irrational decision, especially from a financial perspective,” Samantha says.
But her parents were supportive, and Samantha officially changed her major. Crediting a strong program at ASU, including a summer studying abroad, she finished with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Studio Art with an emphasis in painting and drawing.
After graduating from Arkansas State, Samantha moved back to Mountain Home where she worked part-time as an artist while substitute teaching and continued her love affair with horses.
“I loved being home with my family and horses, but I knew I would eventually need a terminal degree, so I began applying to graduate school.”
Once accepted into the Masters of Fine Arts program at Memphis College of Art, she began packing for her new adventure. After completing the intensive two-year program, she was offered a job recruiting for her new alma mater.
“I was traveling constantly for work, which was great, but that left little time for making my own art, and all the time away didn’t allow me to have a horse in Memphis.”
The next couple years were spent working for MCA and earning her second masters degree (Masters of Arts Teaching), but it was during a trip to New York that she experienced an epiphany.
“When I recount the story now it sounds a little cheesy,” she says, “but truthfully, this is exactly how it happened. One afternoon
I was wandering through the wet streets of Soho and stumbled upon an unexpected and yet familiar sight. And it stopped me cold. There, in the window of an unmarked storefront, was an enormous black and white image of a windblown horse. Oblivious to the steady drizzle, I stood on the sidewalk staring. I was transfixed. It was this serendipitous discovery of a gallery in Soho, that featured an entire show of massive, wall-sized horse images, that freed me.”
She continued, “Still licking my metaphorical wounds from graduate school, I was floundering artistically. The internal battle between what I wanted to make and what I thought I should be making paralyzed me. Voices of past professors, who had dismissed my chosen imagery (horses) as trite and cliché, echoed constantly through my mind. But there, in that gallery, surrounded by the spectacular photos of the Horses of Sable Island, I felt inspired and validated.”
And, so, Samantha began to create. Big, beautiful paintings of horses.
“It’s really impossible to separate ourselves from our past,” she says. “Horses are the visual language that feels most authentic to me, but that doesn’t only include straight-forward equine imagery. Whether I am drawing, painting, sewing with horsehair, or creating rust patterns from used horseshoes, each process begins with the horse. Memory, identity, family, and loss are very fluid and complex concepts for me. Horses allow me a consistent and stable point of entry. They provide the foundation for my explorations.”
Samantha also uses her art to address some of life’s more difficult challenges.
“It’s never simply about a horse. Horses are the visual vocabulary for exploring more esoteric ideas. Notions of illness, age, and loss have permeated my work. The deterioration of the body and of memory are closely related for me. Utilizing parts of the equine anatomy, including the rust “grown” from used horseshoes, is a way for me to acknowledge and perhaps prolong this deterioration.”
She goes on to say, “In the past few years, I have lost several close family members, and the reverberations of those losses continue to impact and influence me. The desire to understand or commemorate these complex relationships has become an underlying theme for much of my recent work.”
What Samantha and others have noticed about her work is that the horse is a metaphorical placeholder or “visual substitute” for the human form.
“Because I grew up loving horses and studying their anatomy and reading every book I could get my hands on about them, I am more interested in the anatomy of the horse than human forms. Maybe because it feels safer for me; a step removed from the literal representation a human body provides.”
Don’t let this girl fool you though; she’s not afraid of life or of living hers to the fullest. Travel and adventure have always been extremely important parts of the creative process for her. New York City and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, are favorite destinations. Multiple trips to Europe spent absorbing the art and rich histories of Italy, Spain, England, France, and the Czech Republic provide her endless inspiration.
Samantha currently lives in Memphis with her husband, Stephen, and their three dogs. In addition to exhibiting her artwork in galleries and museums across the country, she teaches at the high school and college level and gives select private lessons. But on a perfect day you can find her working in her studio or at the stable where she boards her horse.
The little girl from Mountain Home who dreamed of making horses her life’s work has seen that dream become a reality in the most beautiful way imaginable—through art. M! June/July 2015
You can see more of Samantha’s artwork at samanthasherry.com.
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