Andrea Kelly

I never knew his name, but I watched him for years; an unimpressive old pony in a nearby field. The sun would sparkle off his white coat or sometimes he would almost disappear in fog while patiently enduring all seasons and weather. At some point I started recording him with photographs and in paint.

He would glow with an atmosphere of colors reflecting off his back, sometimes from up close and sometimes far away. As the years flowed by, all around his field an insidious sprawl of car dealerships, storage units and retail stores erupted and kept advancing. But the field was golden and the briar bushes behind him were red in the spring, green in the summer, purple in the fall and gray in winter.

Passing by the field one day I saw he was laying down. I got out of the car, went under the barbed wire and walked out into the field. The frozen grass crunched and as I approached he looked up. We just watched each other for a while. When I returned with my camera; he was still lying down.

The next day he was gone.

The next time I painted him, instead of a melancholy old pony I made him magnificent, like a horse in the manner of Leonardo Da Vinci, because something about his bearing seemed deserving of a grander and mightier testimony.

I wonder if people look at the empty field; sometimes flooded with light and sometimes with fog and at the place where he stood, and think about loss and change and the passage of time.