Sculptors who work with multiple species agree that with horses, there really is no leeway. If you get your proportions slightly off with a fox or a bird, those things still have some leeway in them – you can still get away with it, and the piece might be quite convincing, even charming. But if you get something wrong with a horse, everyone will know it the instant they look at it. That might sound quite harsh, but we’re all so very aware of horses because of our longstanding intimacy with them.
We’ve lived with or around horses for thousands of years, using them for transport, labour or simply companionship, leading to an obsession with these creatures. The sheer size of the audience who watch them, ride them, and breed them means that there’s a vast demographic who study equine movement and conformation with forensic detail. Every detail of a sculpture is going to be subjected to a much harder, far more informed scrutiny than any equivalent piece portraying another animal. For Bronze Horse Sculptures, contact www.gillparker.com/bronze-horse-sculptures-limited-edition-to-buy/
So the audience for any bronze horse already has an important instinctive, even automatic, body of knowledge about proportion, what each part of the horse does and where weight is distributed. They know instinctively that a leg is weighted differently in a trot than it would be in a canter and that the muscle structure of the hindquarter plays an enormous part in those movements, too. The result is that what might pass with a fox or a bird is caught immediately by an audience steeped in the anatomy of the horse.
The other reason a bronze horse is hard to get right is the large structural complexity of the legs alone. We have to remember that we’re dealing with a machine comprising a whole range of bones, tendons and joints working together with great subtlety to bear weight and carry forward through the various gaits of a horse’s motion. Whether the relaxed strolling pace of a walk, the two-beat rhythm of a trot, the three-beat swing of a canter or the fluid, pounding power of a gallop. Even seemingly minor things, such as an off-angle of the fetlocks or hocks, a too-short or too-long length of stride, an imbalance in weight from one leg to another as a piece moves through its various stages of motion, could make it look graceless or even as though the thing is about to fall over in mid-stride.
A successful piece needs no aesthetic forgiveness; it has to demonstrate complete understanding of the dynamics of the animal itself and how the human eye perceives balance, weight distribution and motion in relation to gravity.