For me, drawing animals is an innate gift. My family always had horses, dogs, cats, and all the creatures that we five children could easily collect. At three, my favorite toys were easel and chalk. Recognizing my passion, my parents allowed me to start art lessons at the age of five. By age nine, I was attending all day class every Saturday at the Art Institute of Chicago, with live models and the entire museum in which to work. It was a young artist’s heaven.

Foxes by Franz Marc, oil on canvas, 1913Franz Marc was a pioneer in the birth of abstract art at the beginning of the twentieth-century. He was born on February 8, 1880, in Munich, Germany and studied at the Munich Art Academy. He traveled to Paris several times where he saw the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the Impressionists.

Marc was a founder in 1911 of the Blaue Reiter group, an influential circle of artists who produced exuberantly colored works based on emotional themes. Much of Marc’s work featured animals---dramatic groups of horses in particular.

The original oil painting of Foxes hangs in the Kuntsmuseum in Dusseldorf, but Giclee prints are available for purchase.

F. Turner Reuter, Jr., curator and board member, and Jaquiline B. Mars, vice-chairman of the board and gala co-chairman  /  Nate Jensen photoMore than four hundred people gathered to celebrate the Museum opening at the National Sporting Library and Museum in Middleburg, Virginia on Saturday, October 8, 2011. Festivities surrounding the opening included a sporting art exhibit, a dinner-dance on the NSLM campus, a three-day coaching event, and a luncheon at beautiful Llangollen.

Susan Smolensky, an artist we featured last December, has won Best in Show at the Women Artists of the West 41st National Juried Exhibition in Rockport, Texas. This was not a sporting art exhibition, but Smolensky’s dramatic steeplechase painting evidently captivated the judges.