The Blue Horse

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Copyright Beth Parker Art 2012

The Blue Horse – 3″ x 5″ Watercolor

Lin (oldrockchick) hosted the WDE at WetCanvas last weekend.  She posted a challenge, to paint one of her reference is monochrome.  This was my response and I had a great time doing it.  Here is what Lin had to say about this wonderful horse reference…

“Max the one-eyed shire horse. One of a rare breed of heavy horses bred at Eglwswrw Shire Horse Farm in Pembrokeshire,Wales. Max lost an eye when he got a thorn in it and it got infected and sadly he had to retire when they couldn’t save it. He was still pulling the visitor trailor round the farm field 2 years ago when we went but they were arranging to retire him as soon as his friend Jackson the ex-drey horse was trained to pull it more slowly. He is a people lover.”



Emerson believed in individualism, non-conformity, and the need for harmony between man and nature. He was a proponent of abolition, and spoke out about the cruel treatment of Native Americans. Influenced by the Eastern philosophy of unity and a divine whole, emphasizing God Immanent, to be found in everyone and everything, Emerson sowed the seeds of the American Transcendentalist movement. He realised the importance of the spiritual inner self over the material external self through studying Kantianism, Confucianism, Neo-Platonism, Romanticism, and dialectical metaphysics and reading the works of Saint Augustine, Sir Francis Bacon, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Shakespeare among many others. During his lifetime and since Emerson has had a profound influence on some of the 19th and 20th century’s most prominent figures in the arts, religion, education, and politics.

More information can be found at http://www.online-literature.com/emerson/