White Horse and Belties

• Title: White Horse & Belties
• Medium: Mixed media – acrylic, crayon, collage
• Substrate: 12oz cotton canvas
• Size: 100cm x 120cm
• Style: Contemporary
• Frame: Yes
• Print available: Yes

David says: Travelling a lot as I do, it’s always nice to return home to Yorkshire and to Ripon and one of the first, and most iconic sights of home is the White Horse of Kilburn. It can be seen from many parts of North Yorkshire – right across the Plain of York from the Pennines and from the motorway as I travel home. The White Horse sits on the escarpment of the Hambleton Hills near Sutton Bank and marks the begining of the North York Moors National Park an area of sweeping moorland that stretches 40 miles to the sea.

I like the visual joke of the painting – the White Horse isn’t real – it’s painted onto the landscape with chalk and the ‘real’ Belted Galloway Cattle aren’t real either – they’re painted onto the canvas. As a print, this has been one of my most popular pictures and that’s because of it’s familiarity to so many people. It has the first flush of Autumn about it but there are still lingering elements of Summer. In order to get the vivid colours necessary for the natural world I use Michael Harding paints when I’m working in oil, but for acrylic paintings such as this I use Golden. For pastels and coloured crayon I more often than not use Caran d’ashe.