“Days Gone By” is an elegant black and white photograph of a lovely young Clydesdale horse in traditional harness. A selected range of quality products including prints, iPad – iPhone cases, t-shirts, mousepads, notepads and many more gift items featuring “Days Gone By” can be seen below and are now available for purchase.
VIEW ALL PRODUCTS FEATURING “DAYS GONE BY”
A selected range of quality products featuring “Friesian Spirit” can be seen below and are now available for purchase.
VIEW ALL PRODUCTS FEATURING “FRIESIAN SPIRIT”
Today was a rather auspicious day – its been a long time coming, but I am very excited to finally be setting up my studio gallery:) I had planned to just move the boxes in, but got a little carried away and started unpacking everything. I felt like a kid at Christmas unpacking all of my art supplies, books and art magazines – many of which I havn’t seen for well over 18 months! My mind is racing with all the things that I want to paint and draw, I really don’t know where to start first – oils, acrylics, colour pencils or something in graphite. I’d really like to have a go at some plein air oil paintings – all I have to do is step outside my studio for inspiration in every direction, from the beautiful landscape to the baby lambs and calves that are being born on all the farms around here – including ours, but thats a subject for another post, as I really need to catch up on posts that I meant to add last week but ran out of time to!
Following on from my last post with photos of the Clydesdales from the Dardanup Heritage Park Heavy Horse Show, I thought I would share some of the photos of the Team Australia Liberty Horse display performed by brother and sister team, Sam and Sasha Watson from Horses and Horsemen.
The performance shows the willingness, agility, intelligence and responsiveness of these magnificent animals and the incredible relationship that can be created between man and horse. The display involved a number of different and often very difficult maneuvers, with the liberty horses following instruction and direction from voice and subtle body language cues. What I found most amazing and awe inspiring was the willingness and enjoyment all the horses displayed, they were clearly enjoying the performance as much as the audience was, even the six month old weanlings were eager and willing to perform even with the noise and distraction of the large crowd and bright orange safety fences!
I was specifically taking photos for reference material for future paintings (and have already flagged a number of shots that are going to make a wonderful new series of paintings) but here are a few shots of the performance which I can *highly* recommend as a must see for anyone who loves horses!
Team Australia Liberty Horse display © 2010 South West Photography
Team Australia Liberty Horse Display © 2010 South West Photography
Team Australia Nine Horse Liberty Display © 2010 South West Photography
Team Australia Two by Two Liberty Horse Display © 2010 South West Photography
Liberty Horse Display © 2010 South West Photography
Roman Riding Liberty Horse display © 2010 South West Photography
Next post will include some photos from the tent pegging display by 10th Light Horse Bunbury Troop.
All images from the Liberty Horse display can be viewed on the Events section of my South West Photography website.
x Michelle
Michelle Wrighton: Animal, Wildlife & Landscape Fine Art & Photography
SOUTH WEST PHOTOGRAPHY: Portrait, Event, Landscape and Fine Art Photography Prints
FACEBOOK: Michelle Wrighton Artist
TWITTER: artistMichelleW
BUY CUSTOMIZED ART POSTERS, ART PRINTS, T-SHIRTS & GIFTS: Zazzle
BUY CARDS, PHOTO PRINTS, CANVAS ART AND FRAMED ART PRINTS: Redbubble
‘Horse of Colour’ is a new digital oil horse painting in which I have again gone for a contemporary look, focused on the colours rather than detail, using soft pastel hues of violet, lemon, mint and baby blue highlighted brush strokes floated over the blended colours to express the soft romanticism of a much loved kind and gentle show pony.
Horse of Colour - modern horse painting by Michelle Wrighton
Close up cropped image to show detail
‘Horse of Colour’ will be available for purchase as art prints and on other gifts for horses lovers in my Zazzle and Redbuble stores in the near future.
Thanks for visiting my blog and sharing my art and photography with your family and friends!
x Michelle
Michelle Wrighton: Animal, Wildlife & Landscape Fine Art & Photography
FACEBOOK: Michelle Wrighton Artist
TWITTER: artistMichelleW
BUY CUSTOMIZED ART POSTERS, ART PRINTS, T-SHIRTS & GIFTS: Zazzle
BUY CARDS, PHOTO PRINTS, CANVAS ART AND FRAMED ART PRINTS: Redbubble
‘Summer Heat’ is an original painting based on a photo I took of my Standardbred gelding Tommy in our back paddock last summer. I avoided putting too much detail in the painting and chose warm yellow and orange hues to really capture the feeling of a hot summers day in rural Australia.
Summer Heat - modern contemporary equine art by Michelle Wrighton
Summer Heat - Close up
‘Summer Heat’ is available for sale as art prints and gifts items in my Redbubble and Zazzle shops, and signed prints are available for sale in my Etsy shop Art By Michelle
Thanks for visiting my blog and sharing my art and photography with your family and friends!
x Michelle
Michelle Wrighton: Animal, Wildlife & Landscape Fine Art & Photography
FACEBOOK: Michelle Wrighton Artist
TWITTER: artistMichelleW
BUY CUSTOMIZED ART POSTERS, ART PRINTS, T-SHIRTS & GIFTS: Zazzle
BUY CARDS, PHOTO PRINTS, CANVAS ART AND FRAMED ART PRINTS: Redbubble
I’ve always loved working with dark coloured and black backgrounds to create dramatic lighting in a painting. Colour Pencils and pastels are two traditional mediums that this technique works extremely well with, and I am pleased to say that it is the same for paintings created with digital pastels. It takes an awful lot of self control for me to stop adding more and more detail to a painting (traditional or digital), but I am loving exploring painting more freely and expressively while still capturing the essence of my subject, so I can see a few more of this style of painting in the future.
The Dark Horse - Michelle Wrighton © 2010
A selected range of quality products including canvas prints, iPad cases, t-shirts, mousepads, notepads and many more gift items featuring the racehorse painting “Dark Horse” can be seen below and are now available for purchase.
VIEW ALL PRODUCTS FEATURING “DARK HORSE”
Thanks for visiting my blog and sharing my art and photography with your family and friends!
x Michelle
Michelle Wrighton: Animal, Wildlife & Landscape Fine Art & Photography
FACEBOOK: Michelle Wrighton Artist
TWITTER: artistMichelleW
BUY CARDS, PHOTO PRINTS, CANVAS ART AND FRAMED ART PRINTS: Redbubble
I’m sure that artists reading this will understand, LOL and non-artists will just think I am weird, but sometimes a painting takes on a life of its own with such determination that it almost seems paint itself – almost as if the subject has such strength of personality and character that its spirit insists on being immortalised in art.
Friesian Spirit is one of those paintings.
Friesian Spirit - Equine portrait painting by Michelle Wrighton
I havn’t decided at this time if ‘Friesian Spirit’ will be made available in my RedBubble and Zazzle art print and gift shops, as I am leaning towards offering this one as Limited Edition prints only. If you would like to be notified when ‘Friesian Spirit’ is available for purchase, simply subscribe to the rss feed for this blog, or join the new page I have created at Facebook for my artwork – Michelle Wrighton Artist
Thanks for visiting my blog and sharing my art and photography with your family and friends!
x Michelle
Michelle Wrighton: Animal, Wildlife & Landscape Fine Art & Photography
FACEBOOK: Michelle Wrighton Artist
TWITTER: artistMichelleW
SHOP CUSTOMIZED ART PRINTS, T-SHIRTS & GIFTS: Zazzle
SHOP CARDS, MATTED, LAMINATED AND FRAMED ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY PRINTS: Redbubble
First of all I have to have a whinge about Telstra’s internet services for country clients. I admit our wireless connection is reasonably good, but is absolutely pointless when you can’t access the internet anyway because the 10GIG combined maximum Up/download limit per month before getting capped back to 1992 dial-up speed is absolutely, positively pathetic! C’mon Telstra its 2010! Country people are not stuck in the dark ages without computers, how about doing your country customers a favour, get with the times and give us a few of the options your city customers enjoy!
LOL ok, rant over for the moment anyway! It is a genuine complaint, probably aggravated today due to grumpiness from getting very little sleep last night due to my daughters little standarbred mare Sandy having colic. She is feeling a lot better today thank goodness. I think it was a combination of new grass after the rains and a change in feed – although she was introduced to it slowly she is a bit of a piggy and stole some of Crickets in the morning. She’s back on just hay rations for a few days and hopefully won’t have any more problems.
And as for Fostering Dogs 101…or How to fail Fostering 101 in four easy steps:
1) Vow and declare to never have any other breed than Border Collies.
2) Agree to look after my sisters one year old Koolie while she finds him a good home.
3) Before we get half way home decide we will keep him if he fits in with our four Border Collies.
Well the four Border Collies seem to be accepting him into the pack quite well, so it looks like our canine family now consists of 4 collies and a Koolie. Not quite a Border Collie, but at least he’s a sheepdog:)
The Border Collie Brigade: L to R Bolt, Zeke, Trinity and Taj at the front
Border Collie Dogs
And Flash the Koolie:
Update: Unfortunately Flash was unable to stay with us, if it was just one or two things we would have worked through them, but he was constantly urinately in the house (causing Zeke and Bolt to go backwards in their toilet training as well), he became very domineering over the young boys, Bolt in particular and was making him very nervy, he was going up/over/through fences to chase the sheep, horses and chickens (a habit he taught Bolt that we are still trying to break). Unfortunately that would have meant long term confinement on a chain for Flash which is something that I do not agree with. Luckily his breeder was able to take him back and Flash is now living on the farm where he was born.
Flash - Australian Koolie dog
Five Feral Farm dogs
Koolies (also known as Coolies/German Coolies) are an Australian developed working dog predominantly bred to work sheep and have many similarities in personality and nature to Border Collies. As they have been bred for working ability rather than for conformation show ring/beauty pageant looks, there is a range of variations in size, build and coat colour within the breed according to the terrain and type of work they were required to do.
“Stars and Stripes” is my new western influenced cowboy and horse painting.
"Stars and Stripes" original painting by Michelle Wrighton
Art prints and gifts featuring this painting are available for sale in the following places;
Art By Michelle Etsy shop – signed and custom prints options for sale
Redbubble Art Print Shop Gift cards, matted, laminated, canvas and framed art prints for sale
Zazzle Art Shop Posters, ornaments, t-shirts, bags, posters, coffee mugs, canvas prints magnets, shoes, photo cards for sale
I can also be found on:
FACEBOOK – My Artwork
FACEBOOK – My Photography
SOUTH WEST PHOTOGRAPHY – my photography website
Thanks for visiting my blog and sharing my art and photography with your family and friends!
x Michelle
Impressionist style original oil painting created with wacom tablet and stylus.
These Boots were made for Workin' - Cowboy Art by Michelle Wrighton
Greeting cards, laminated, matted, canvas and framed prints of “Skipping Stones” can be purchased from my Redbubble shop: 
