Horse…thing

I’ve been story-hungry for as long as I can remember, and as a kid, the one thing all my favourite books had in common was that they were animal stories. Lady and the Tramp, Lion King, Bambi, The Jungle Book, When Lion Could Fly, When Hippos Were Hairy ( God, I loved these books!) and later Black Beauty and Call of the Wild. One of the rarer animal-centric books I read was Dimple: The Adventures of a Little Donkey. I re-discovered this book while organizing my shelves recently, read it cover-to-cover and came across this very beautiful illustration:

 

I’m not sure what it is about horses, for me. Maybe it’s because literature is populated with so many empathetic horse figures, always portrayed as simultaneously gentle and powerful, that has shaped my mental picture. Maybe it’s just the naturally graceful lines that form your average horse-outline. ( It has always seemed really fitting to me that they’re described as a creation of Poseidon’s. There does seem to be something of that same calm/might of a sea, about a horse.)

Either way, turns out I like horses. Except, I can’t really draw horses, so I’ll leave you with this dragon-horse hybrid of sorts, instead.

Maybe I should just claim it’s another obscure Greek mythological figure?