During the project "Portrait of a village" I started painting life size horses with oil on canvas and in ink on paper. This is still ongoing. There is something about painting these strong and trusting animals that I can not express so well on a smaller scale.

"Strength and fragility", the Friesian horse with a skeleton behind it, is an homage to George Stubbs. Stubbs (1724-1806) was an English horse painter. He locked himself up for a few years, dissecting dead horses and drawing their muscles and bone structure. His book "Anatomy of the horse" has been used by horse painters ever since, and is still available today.

A quote from the painter Rosa Bonheur (around 1850) that touches me: "The horse is, like man, the most beautiful and most miserable of creatures, only, in the case of man, it is vice or property that makes him ugly. He is responsible for his own decadence, while the horse is only a slave."