Sally Eckhoff’s painting rests on the idea of preservation. To observe something deeply is the first step in helping it live, and painting is the best way to see something. A corollary to this concept is the idea of instant grat. An artist has to cover miles of rough territory, like a horse. We need a bite of grass, a pat of courage, an exchange of information to help navigate the earth. And so we come to the object of scrutiny: the horse, Spot.
Spot is more than a real animal. He represents the struggles of the body, the depredations of age, and the craving for adventure. What Sally and Spot have had together: innumerable portrait sessions, crises met, falls taken, and a walk in the woods that has lasted more than twenty years. You will notice a radical change in Spot in the later paintings. A chronic and painful disease known familiarly as “moon blindness” forced the surgical removal of his right eye. The story ends with a trip underground, where the unlikely couple dissolves into a welter of hair, bones, and beer cans—the legend of an interspecies love affair.
Spot continues to work as a therapy horse at the High & Mighty Center for Therapeutic Riding and Driving in Ghent, NY. High & Mighty does important work for disabled and physically-challenged children and adults, including veterans. Please consider a contribution to this essential and compassionate program.
Sally Eckhoff, who is both writer and painter, has published hundreds of pieces of written work in variety of media and shown her visual artwork in New York, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Bologna, and other cities around the world. She grew up on Long Island and lived in Manhattan’s East Village for seventeen years, later making her home in Upstate New York. While working as an East Village artist and musician, she made her living as a typesetter, a poll site inspector, a silk cutter, an upholsterer, a crewmember on board a schooner, and, finally, a journalist at the Village Voice, where she ran the phototypesetting equipment until she was invited to join as an essayist and critic. F*ck Art (Let’s Dance), her first book, is a memoir of ten years of rollicking downtown life and art through the eyes of an outsider/insider—an adventurer to the core.
