The Art of Horse Racing Competition Produces Three Winners

Over the summer we invited artists across the land to send us spectacular designs that captured the power, beauty and excitement found in the sport of horse racing....

On a regular basis The Trail of Painted Ponies will announce a competitive showcase and issue a Call for Designs to established as well as emerging artists across the country, inviting them to submit designs along a certain theme. (Indeed, with this month's website update we are announcing a Halloween Harvest Contest - for details, Click Here.) In July we sent out a call to artists who had previously expressed an interest in painting a Pony and signed up online for our artist's database, letting them know that we were looking for spectacular designs that captured the power, speed and excitement found in horse racing.

The Art of Horse Racing is how we labeled the competition, and we told everyone up front that we were looking for something we hadn't seen before. We said we were interested in designs that captured the grace, beauty, raw power and energy found in horse races, but we were also open to designs that dramatically displayed the excitement and pageantry that surrounded the "Sport of Kings," as horse racing has been called.

More designs came in than we expected, and once again we found ourselves amazed at how versatile our horse forms are when it comes to accommodating diverse creative expressions. All the submissions deserved a prize. But as in horse racing itself, only three can finish "in the money."

First Place

The winner by a nose was titled "The Front Runner." by Kim Ratigan, a fine artist from Ontario, Canada who specializes in animal portraiture and is a member of the Equine Art Guild. Second Place

Coming in a close second was "A Filly's Affair," by Cheryl A. Harris, who has her own design and illustration business in Covington, Indiana, and who also created the Painted Pony figurine, "Keeper of the Sacred Fire," released this summer. Third Place

Third by less than a length was "Off to the Races," by a graphic designer at the University of Illinois, Janet Snyder, who also created the inspiring figurine "For Spacious Skies."