This cluster of horses gives me the feeling of a moment of creation, as if these horses have just come out of a piece of southerly wind, as in the Bedouin legend. This painting started without a real theme, as it was a challenge enough to conform to the shapes in the panel. I immediately saw a buckskin as the central horse, and I developed the grouping of heads purely from the design aspects of the shape–I needed dark muzzles and manes to define the linear elements, and the composition evolved from there. The horses are purely imagined, they don’t have names or histories, and they exist primarily from my stored memories of all the horses I have observed and painted during my career. Because the lighting on the heads was muted out of necessity to maintain the values of the panel, I added the early dawn light over the sea to give it the sense of the beginning of time