It’s almost pot luck if the subjects that move the artist include subjects that have popular appeal. Some of the things I do have great popular appeal. Kittens and birds. But when I start getting into esoterica like still-wet newborn kittens, something that to me has an overpowering joy and emotion, it only reaches other hard-core cat nuts who’ve raised kittens and most of the people who want a fluffy kitten are looking at the blind squirming wet thing wondering why I put that much work into it.

We’re not any of us painting for the public at large anyway.

We’re painting for people who share our particular real interests. I’d like to do more prehistoric animals. I’m working up to doing prehistoric animals. When I get to the point where I can compose them well completely from imagination — because there are just no real models to be had and anything like that is some other artist’s concept — then I may start to reach a small niche of people who also love dinosaurs and Pleistocene mammals and so on.

And it’ll go right past anyone who doesn’t. By loving horses, you tap a huge market of people who share your feelings. If it was aardvarks it would be a narrow niche.

My daughter also made the point that people in general respond to positive images — to art that shows a good side of life on a pure animal level. Paintings of landscapes free of billboards and often with lots of game animals sell, and people want to live with them.

For some reason though my big cats didn’t sell as well as I thought they would for how well they were done — and my daughter said it was because to live with, they’d be a little threatening, a large predator right loose in your house. It takes a cat nut to see that the tiger’s in a good mood, someone familiar with cat body language. And then to be so fond of tigers that it overcomes the discomfort of having a life size one on their walls. They sell well when I do them small, but when I did them life sized it was a very different matter!

Yet maybe I should’ve just gone directly to a zoo or natural history museum with those old pastels, where they might fit right in with the exhibits and fit context. Once art leaves the artist, it’s in the context it’s going to and marketing it is just finding that context.

Angry young people are very comforted by dark art — dark subjects, angry themes and so on are a relief to someone going through a lot of personal trouble and rage especially in situations where that’s denied and eveyrone’s pressuring them to be happy when they’re not.

Some of those grow up to be avant garde wealthy and want something no one else has… and then that’s where the high-priced elephant dung shock art comes in, it’s someone trying to push the boundaries when they’ve already gone down and arguments over “what is the proper subject for art” have been kicked apart for over a century. Some of why it doesn’t appeal to me is that it’s flogging a dead horse. People paint what they want to now, and have for a very long time.

But decades ago in art classes in college that could not include the artist wanting to paint anything that would be popular in Southern Living or anything like that — any subjects that nonartists really love. The artist is supposed to only want to break taboos and can’t have some side of personality that just resonates with baby foals or fluffy kittens. It’s all a big social game.

Art pricing is very subjective and rests on reputation, so the judges are important and the competitions help establish value. You may be right that this isn’t a competition piece — but only on that prejudice because the painting itself is absolutely splendid. I’m not even into horses per se or baby things unless they’re cats, and I love this foal.