The Dance Continues For Artist Leslie Hudson-Tolles

By Shannon Hicks

Leslie Hudson-Tolles had a very good month in October. The Newtown resident and artist saw her work selected for use on the covers of two major publications: first there was the October 8 issue of The Chronicle of The Horse, and then she landed the cover for the catalog for Eastern States Equine Affaire. Both publications used her 2001 colored pencil work “After The Dance,” a closeup of a horse after it has just finished a dressage performance.

Chronicle is a national weekly magazine based in Middleburg, Va. It is a major publication within the equine world, providing readers with editorial coverage of one featured competition each week, plus the line results of more than 1,300 competitions nationally and internationally — whether dressage, combined training, combined driving, racing over fences, or horse shows. The magazine also offers profiles of leading riders and horses, opinion articles, a monthly calendar of upcoming events, news items of general interest, and advertising information.

Ms Hudson-Tolles is already talking with its editors about two more cover works.

Equine Affaire: The Great American Horse Exposition is held four times a year, in four locations. It is a major horse event, with educational and shopping opportunities, breed and youth pavilions, and horse-related equipment. It’s like The Big E for the equine world.

The next Equine Affaire event, in fact, will be November 11–14 in West Springfield, Mass., at the Big E fairgrounds, and Ms Hudson-Tolles will have a booth at the fair, where she will be exhibiting her artwork.

“The Equine Affaire cover was such a shock,” she said with a great laugh. “I went to the mailbox and pulled it out, along with the rest of my mail.

“It was such a processing delay. I just looked at the cover of this catalog and it didn’t register — there’s my painting. It’s the opposite of me taking my artwork out and showing it to gallery owners. Here it was, coming to me.”

The strength of “After The Dance” lies not in its size (at 24 by 22 inches, it is a relatively small work) but within its presentation. By depicting only a portion of the strong animal in her frame, Ms Hudson-Tolles has upped the imagined strength of the horse in the frame.

Viewers see the horse’s left eye, most of its nose, and some of its neck. Taut muscles near the eye can’t be missed, which was part of the artist’s intent.

“This work shows a young horse coming out of his dressage test,” Ms Hudson-Tolles explained. “He’s a little worried. The bit is lifted and turned, a few hairs are out of place, and the eye is almost dead center.

“It’s not perfect — it’s real. I didn’t want this — or any of my works — to be photo real, I want them to be accurate,” she explained.

“I love doing ‘real’ horses,” Ms Hudson-Tolles said recently while walking through her home and discussing her artwork. “They may not necessarily be the prettiest or most handsome horses, but they’re real.”

Ms Hudson-Tolles is a full-time art instructor in the Ridgefield public school system.

At home — which is Tolhom Studio, in the Hattertown district of Newtown — she has works in varying degrees of completedness. In addition to colored pencils, she works in graphite, pastels, and acrylics — in all shades except black.

“These are colored pencil paintings,” she explains. “It’s layer upon layer of colored pencil. The layering of colors mixes the shades.

“It’s a very time-consuming medium,” she admits. “After the Dance,” for instance, took more than a year to complete.

Most of the works are within her studio area, while others that have just been framed and/or matted are on walls or waiting to be hung around the house she shares with her daughters and a few dogs. Outside, of course, is a barn with a few horses; it has been a lifelong passion between Ms Hudson-Tolles and horses.

One print horse she recently finished, called “Farm Boy Steppin’ Out,” depicts an older male horse after he has been pulling a sleigh. He is still wearing his sleigh bells and harness; he looks like he has been working. Ms Hudson-Tolles has captured the horse midshake, while he is shaking off snow, or sweat, or perhaps both. Snow is falling, the horse’s mane is tousled — it is an image of an event still in motion.

“Horses like that, they’re real working men, and they look it,” said Ms Hudson-Tolles. “One of my bugaboos is people who don’t know how to convey equipment. It’s just as important to show a horse’s gear as the horse itself.”

The horse world is not unfamiliar with Ms Hudson-Tolles and her work. Among other achievements, her work has been included in Anthropologie, an annual benefit for Pegasus Therapeutic Riding, Inc, based in Westport, each year since 1995; she has been represented in national exhibitions including The American Academy of Equine Art’s Fall Show presented at The International Museum of the Horse, Kentucky Horse Park, Lexington, Ky. (2000, 2002, and 2003); and in April 2001 she was part of “Spirit of The Horse,” a national invitational exhibition presented at Northern Westchester Center for the Arts in Mount Kisco, N.Y.

Most recently, Ms Hudson-Tolles won the first place Staff Award and second place People’s Choice at the 2004 Colored Pencil Society of New England Juried Exhibition, held last spring in Peterborough, N.H.

She has also been featured at Eastern States Equine Affaire for the last five years.

Although the majority of Ms Hudson-Tolles’ oeuvre consists of realistic drawings, she has recently stepped into art depicting carousel horses. Her background with getting the details correct on horses’ equipment is paying off now that she is depicting imaginary horses that sport baubles, beads, and reins that are just as important to depict correctly as is the equipment of a real horse.

“Invitation To Ride” shows viewers a white carousel horse from the neck up. Its eye may be a glass bead, but just as children are enchanted by the horses they climb onto when they mount a carousel, viewers of this Hudson-Tolles work can find themselves looking at this horse and seeing its character.

“There’s horse art and there is art of a horse,” says Leslie Hudson-Tolles. “I prefer art of a horse, which can stand alone.”