Pollie Painting Depicts Mackinac's Working Horses at Library Exhibit

Elizabeth Pollie with one of her Mackinac paintings, "A Rest, Well Deserved," which is now owned by Nancy and Bradley Chambers.

In the draft horses on Mackinac Island, Elizabeth Pollie sees large, gentle servants that wait patiently for a new load, seemingly disinterested in the activities around them, yet always observing. In these horses she can find a poem.

"I'm truly awestruck by them," she said. "I think they comprise a sense of strength and beauty that I am completely awed by. The draft horse always strikes me as these kind of patient workers, and I see that over and over again. There is a certain sense of servitude about them that I feel a lot of compassion for."

So she paints them in all their moods, when they wait, when they haul sightseers or freight, at the end of their day, and she can't seem to shake her fascination with them.

A selection of Ms. Pollie's paintings will be on display through July at the Mackinac Island Public Library in a gallery showing entitled "Horsepower: The Horses of Mackinac." A reception opens the exhibit Thursday, June 29, from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.

The exhibit, she said, is to pay homage to the beauty of the horses on Mackinac.

"I want to give back to the Island here and say, 'This is what I see.'"

A former freelance illustrator and graduate of The College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Ms. Pollie now works and teaches from her West Wind Atelier gallery in Harbor Springs and paints in the representational art genre, or what she calls poetic realism.

"It's realism imbued with a sense of poetry," she said, "so it leaves space for a greater emotional response from the viewer."

She became interested in horses as a subject for her work during a week-long trip to Mackinac Island, where she had visited many times as "a typical tourist," but was on this trip taking the time to view the Island as a painter.

"My whole view of the Island was transformed," she said, "and as I was painting water scenes around the Arnold Dock, I was completely swept away by the horses, watching them, watching what they did on a daily basis, watching how the light changed their shadows, and realizing what a rare jewel Mackinac Island is.

"It truly was like an awakening for me," she said.

She had always thought that exotic places with exciting images to paint were a plane ride away, she said, "and to discover that something so visually exciting was no more than 40 minutes from my own home was just a tremendous gift, artistically and emotionally, and, since then, I've only grown more and more fond of it."

Capturing her images first on film, Ms. Pollie creates her paintings of horses in the studio from the photographs she takes in the field. That way she can freeze the light, the movement, the shadows, and then draw on her experience to compensate for the color and intensity.

"As a representational artist," she said, "it is very important to work on site, so you know what is missing from the photograph."

But to try to capture the horses live, she noted, would require that they stay put for at least an hour, and even then, the light and shadows would change during the composition and the action of the horse would be elusive.

"At a certain point," she said, "you are really departing from that photograph, and pretty early on you are departing . . . to push that, pull this, leave that out."

This, she said, is where the emotional content of the painting is added to the abstract content.

The abstract is the arrangement of shapes and values, values being the contrast between the lights and darks, the shades of black and white, what ones sees when taking the color out of an object and seeing how dark something is compared to the object next to it.

"That's how your brain really does read things," she notes; "not true colors, but true values. So the most important thing to make a representational painting be correct is to have the values correct, not the color."

On the other hand, she said, "because we are human, I am also looking at the emotional object matter and content, and at that point I start to see a beautiful animal, the way the light is pouring over the body, the textures surrounding it, the mood."

She looks to see if the animal is stressed, if it is happy, if the carriage driver is relating somehow to the horse.

By bringing those two elements together, abstract and emotional content, she said, "hopefully, you arrive at a painting that works on a level of design as well as conveying a certain kind of mood or story."

In her classes on painting, Elizabeth Pollie's students are taught five basic values, the foundation of representational art, which she said are drawing and drafting, value, color, design, and edgework.

"Drawing," she said, "is a very basic form of representational painting."

She tells her students, "The better you draw, the less limited you will be in your ability to capture something with a lot of finesse. It is like anything. It is a foundation."

Edgework, is how to handle the edges of a painting, she said. Sharpness and focus don't have to extend all the way to the edge. "It's about letting go," she said.

But don't forget the emotional aspect of representational art, she tells her students.

"Always try to get a sense of what it does to you emotionally. Why am I painting this? Where is

the heart of this picture? I think that's a really important thing. It doesn't have to be a big, long story, but it could be simply how that rusty red truck captures that glimpse of light and how you went right there first. It's still about something abstract, but it does something to us emotionally. So where is the poem in the piece?" she asks them. "Where is the emotion?"

Ms. Pollie has donated one of her paintings to the Mackinac Horsemen's Association for a raffle to raise money for its activities and the 4-H horse programs. Tickets, $20 each or six for $100, can be purchased at the First National Bank or Island Bookstore or by calling (906) 847-3853. The painting, valued at $3,000, is of a team of Carriage Tours horses pulling sightseers. The drawing will be August 13 at the 36th Annual Mackinac Island Horse Show.