Kimry Jelen Paints by the Moon & Creates from the Hip
Kimry Jelen is not alone when she states that riding horses on the beach under a full moon is one of the best things to do on earth.

"My grandfather lived in Yachats on the Oregon Coast," she says. "When I created this painting (that also graces the cover of Cascade Arts & Entertainment), I was remembering as a little girl the many times we drove by the long stretches of beach and of low tide in the bay on the way to and from. I longed to be racing my horse on those clear tracts of sand instead of being in the car, imagining how riding to the coast instead of driving there from Albany would have been much more satisfying. I would study the landscape and think of where we would be trotting, where we would have to jump downed trees, cross streams — there was always a way."

While executing Moonlit Bay, an acrylic on canvas, Jelen recalls how she enjoyed the feelings of the highly alert yet calm intensity when one is free to gallop in the wide open with no one around but you, your horse, the ocean and the moon.

She says, "In this painting, you see the suggestion of Newport Bay, the moon in the horse's eye, who happens to be a bay (a color of a horse — brown coat with black mane, tail and legs). I imagine myself leaning over from is back to look in his eye and pet his neck to thank him for an exhilarating ride." When asked to describe herself as an artist, one of the words Jelen used was 'expressive.'

"I don't have one style of painting and use different mediums, although I work with acrylic and oil mostly," she says. "You could say my art comes from the hip — I'll have a moment where I get a feeling about something. An example would be a painting I just finished called My Mom's Poppies. All of a sudden I got this vision of this beautiful Oriental poppy bush she used to have in our garden when I was growing up. I was amazed that it grew from a tiny green spot to this magnificent bush. So I get that feeling from some memory or something that may have just happened recently and then paint from that feeling."

Kona was a horse Jelen used to work with in Portland. After several trips down to the barn with her camera, the horses eventually got used to her presence and Kona in particular liked it so much he began 'posing' for the artist — looking off at the horizon or just standing still. "He was a character," she says. "I was very involved in this photo shoot and as I stood behind him I realized he was like the horizon and the sky came out of him, so those are the origins of that painting. It looks like a landscape, but it's a horse's back with trees in the skyline."

The White Horse is a painting of a Lusitano stallion owned by friends of the artist. A photographer shot a series of photographs of the horse and allowed Jelen to use them for reference. "You'd never know he was a stallion," she shares. "He's a sweet, round mellow dude that does his job and only wants to do the right thing, so I painted him soft, incorporating a blue shadow instead of a dark one."

Jelen recently participated in an exciting project where she was invited along with 186 other artists to paint a 21-inch panel that would become part of a giant mural entitled Le Cadeau Du Cheval — The Horse Gift conceived by designer Lewis Lavoie. The goal of the piece was to celebrate the horse in a traveling exhibit at international venues for one to two years, with the end goal of donating the mural to a permanent public showcase. The piece took 18 months to complete and was unveiled last September at Spruce Meadows in Calgary Alberta Canada.

"The white horse has stood throughout history as a symbolic hero among other things," says Jelen. "When you consider the horse has given its life to help humans accomplish what we want time and time again, most horses of any color are heroes. Some of us are lucky enough to be best friends and work companions of these sensitive, intelligent and amazing animals. Many of us find horses inspire beauty, healing and hope. They link us to what is wild and free in nature and in ourselves. The size and diversity of this mural represents how big the equine heart is and we pay tribute with our paintings and thank the horse for what it has gifted us."

Jelen's work will be featured the month of February at the High Desert Gallery in Redmond and Sisters and on Oregon Art Beat, February 19 at 8pm and again on Sunday, February 22 at 6pm.

After a long history of working on ranches in the Rockies, the artist draws her inspiration from natural surroundings as well as memory. She got in sync with the seasons and the way light travels across the sky and attests to the grounding and inspirational feeling from being out in nature. Artist Georgia O'Keefe is another source of inspiration for Jelen, who sees her as someone who took the time to really look at something for what it was. "I admire people like Georgia O'Keefe and Jane Goodall because they poured their souls into what they were doing and were brave enough to live their lives doing what they believed in their way. I'm working on that. I've learned to do what comes naturally and stop being frustrated about not being able to recreate an image perfectly onto the canvas but use that same image in my mind as inspiration instead. It's about allowing ourselves our own way of expression."