Forged in Bronze

Magnificent life-size horses—including USDF’s own iconic landmark—are the work of the celebrated equine artist Gwen Reardon

Article and photos by Lisa Munniksma

This article is reprinted from the November 2015 issue of USDF Connection. Artist Gwen Reardon recently passed away, and we thought it a fitting tribute to her to shine a spotlight on her art and the legacy she leaves behind.

Visitors to Lexington, Kentucky, can’t escape the city’s “Horse Capital of the World” designation. Those arriving by air come through Blue Grass Airport, landscaped with equine murals and life-sized horse statues. Motorists pass through thousands of acres of pristine horse farms on the rural roads leading into town.

Once downtown, visitors marvel at Thoroughbred Park—two and a half acres featuring the life-size bronze depiction of a seven-horse race plus six additional bronzes of broodmares, foals, and the legendary racehorse and sire Lexington. Those who tour the famed Kentucky Horse Park not only enjoy seeing live horses; they also view 17 life-sized equine statues, including one that graces the entrance to the USDF National Education Center.

Many of these pieces are the work of the internationally renowned equine artist Gwen Reardon, whose studio not coincidentally is located 12 miles outside of downtown Lexington.

“The detail of Gwen’s sculptures is quite amazing, and we’re fortunate to have her work on display at Thoroughbred Park,” says Mary Quinn Ramer, president of VisitLEX, the Lexington convention and visitors bureau. “Thoroughbred Park makes a strong visual statement of Lexington’s love of Thoroughbreds and a lovely gateway. It is also a magnificent opportunity for visitors to snap photos and create lasting memories of their time in the Horse Capital of the World.”

Art Imitates Life

Reardon may be best-known for her life-sized bronze horse sculptures—she’s produced somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 (she says she doesn’t keep count) for businesses, organizations, individuals, and government projects around the world—but she also creates smaller sculptures, sketches, and paintings of animals of all kinds.

That her life’s work is capturing horses in art is fitting, as her love for each developed side by side. Reardon’s father, Chris Reardon, was a Saddlebred trainer, and Gwen would accompany him to the barn from the youngest age. Her mother, Kathleen, she says, was their support system. Reardon will still happily describe every horse in her life, offering glimpses of the quirks and personalities of each—the same traits she is known for capturing in her artwork.

While the young girl hung around in barns and at horse shows, waiting for her father and for her chance in the saddle, she passed the time by sketching horses in the dirt, shaping horses out of straw, and drawing horses on show programs.

“I can’t remember in my life not drawing and carving,” she says.

All of this time around horses turned Reardon into a champion saddle-seat equitation rider. Although Saddlebreds were her main mounts as a child, “I’ve tried everything that anyone would let me,” she says. She rode with dressage trainer and International Circus Hall of Fame member Arthur Konyot—grandfather of US Olympian and World Equestrian Games dressage team veteran Tina Konyot— and says she has an appreciation for the ways in which dressage benefits a horse.

“That was always fun, to get to ride a different kind of horse,” Reardon says.

To learn more about horses, Reardon has worked as a trainer, a saddle-seat-equitation coach, and a racehorse groom and exercise rider. She considered getting her Thoroughbred trainer’s license but was afraid she would get hooked on working with horses professionally again, and decided to stick with her art instead.

“An artist learns to look at [horses] differently, because you’re wanting to know more. It’s an automatic thing,” Reardon says. “Your hands are on them, and you get a feeling for it.…You start reading their personalities, because they’re all different. They have a different idea of themselves. It’s one of the exciting things about them.

“The more you read about and learn about the horse, you just get pulled in.”

Reardon can’t recall exactly when people started buying her art but says that, as a kid, the sales of her show-program drawings earned her enough money to fund the purchase of art books and visits to art museums.

“It was really a break for me,” she says.

In New York City’s Madison Square Garden to compete at the legendary National Horse Show, Reardon visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and bought some art books at its gift shop. While her father was training horses in Chicago, she took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Aside from art class in school, it was Reardon’s first formal art training, and she recalls making drawings of animals at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.

Painting became Reardon’s first serious means of artistic expression because she couldn’t afford to cast her clay sculptures in metal, she says. But her clients often asked to purchase the clay and wax models that she would create to paint from, and so she began to gravitate toward sculpture as her main genre.

From the Studio to the Street

Tullamore Farm, Reardon’s Lexington home for more than 20 years, began as a paddock and run-in shed for one of her “heart horses,” the aging Appaloosa gelding Hawk.

“That was one horse. That was my plan,” Reardon says.

That modest plan has morphed into a home, a garage, many fenced paddocks, multiple run-in sheds, a barn that for a long time did double duty housing both horses and sculpture molds, and a small house (dubbed “the hut”) for her daughter Renee. (Reardon’s other daughter, Roxanne, lives in Lexington.) A studio was the last building to go up; it became obvious, when Reardon was commissioned to do six life-sized sculptures for Blue Grass Airport, that she needed more room for her art and also to give herself living space away from her work.

Today Reardon and her daughter share their 38 acres of rolling pasture and hay land with seven horses, four dogs (including Zip, an opinionated 17-year-old Australian cattle dog who was born deaf), and a few cats. Reardon is quick to giggle about this group, admitting that it’s turned into more of a menagerie than she’d expected.

Reardon’s home is filled with horse books, photos, and her art—though she doesn’t hold on to the initial quarter scale models of her life-sized works because “I would need a bigger house” if she did, she says.

Those small models represent one step in Reardon’s creative process. A sculpture project begins with a sketch of the animal. Next, Reardon creates a wire armature—a skeleton on which to mold clay—and then a maquette, or clay model. After the initial clay model is created, Reardon’s work moves from a bright, high-ceilinged room in her home into the two-story studio building just across the driveway.

Although the work itself may be a solitary pursuit, for Reardon the process of creating equine art is a collaborative one. One gets the feeling that she enjoys coming to know each horse’s personality as much as the work itself.

“I like the input of people that have been working around this animal,” she says. “There’s no way for me to know everything, like the type of horse he was. That helps me decide on what he’s doing or not doing, or how he’s looking [in the statue]. Just standing can [yield] a lot of different expressions, and so I do what I call a sketch. Sometimes it’s a drawing, and I say, ‘Here’s what I think from what I’ve found out about the horse.’”

She strives to capture the animal, inside and out, in the finished piece—even such tiny details as where the veins on the neck appear and how the tail hairs are arranged. She says she asks about such things as “how you turn an ear. Is that horse paying attention to a leg signal?”

Reardon hesitates to estimate how long a project will take, saying that it depends on her research and the participation of the patrons who have commissioned the work. She takes on only one commissioned piece at a time. When she can fit it in between assignments, she works on what she calls her “life project,” an eight-by-twelve-feet life-size painting—of a horse, of course.

From Thoroughbred Park on, I’ve been busy,” Reardon says.

Since those multiple bronzes were installed in 1992, she has enjoyed a continual stream of commissions. Three of her statues stand at the Kentucky Horse Park: The Spirit of the American Morgan (1998), commissioned to honor the 200th anniversary of the American Morgan Horse Association; and two bronzes of foals, Frisky Filly and The Promise (2002).

The Half-Pass, the life-size bronze landmark at the entrance to the USDF National Education Center, was installed in 2010 (see “Reardon Statue Is USDF’s Crown Jewel” below).

Reardon’s most recent work, a bronze statue of the racehorse Native Dancer commissioned by Marylou Whitney and John Hendrickson, was unveiled August 1 at Congress Park’s Centennial Park in Saratoga Springs, NY. The piece took longer than Reardon had anticipated after she slipped on ice and broke her arm in late winter 2015.

Next on Reardon’s work list: a life-size bronze statue of the late Thoroughbred stallion Street Cry for Darley Farm in Lexington. Perhaps because of her Bluegrass location, she receives a lot of commissions for works featuring Thoroughbreds or racing themes, but she says she’d like the opportunity to do more dressage pieces, too.

“It’s Always the Next One”

Which of her many works is Reardon’s favorite? Actually, none of them.

“It’s always the next one,” she says. “At the time that I’m working on a piece, that’s the only thing there is. That’s where all of my energy is going, and I’m focused that way.”

Dressage enthusiasts—who are famously addicted to the quest for perfection in horsemanship—will appreciate the attention to detail Reardon lavishes on her works. She equates the process to “cleaning a horse, hair by hair, fifty times. I used to say twenty, but that wasn’t close enough to the truth. You’re shaping it from the tip of the ears: every hair, in the ear, out and around, down the neck. You go over that many, many times. As you’re going, you’re developing more and more detail.”

But although a dressage rider may never truly be satisfied with a test, Reardon says she knows when a piece is finished.

“There is a sense of, ‘This is as far as I should go.’ You hear these stories of people who never finish a job because they can always keep on working on it.…I’ve really learned over time that when I’m done with a sculpture, I’m done with a sculpture.”

Now 83, Reardon says she can’t imagine retiring, either from art or from horses. She admits she’s thought about it, but “I don’t see it.”

After a lifetime spent with her dual passions, “You’ve gotten so acquainted with the creature, you’ve gotten so acquainted with the materials. As long as I can do it, I will do it.”

Freelance writer Lisa Munniksma first moved to Lexington in 2002, and she’s always thought Gwen Reardon’s Thoroughbred Park statues represent the very reason she wanted to live in this city: It’s all about the horses.