We have been fortunate to meet a number of supportive and enthusiastic people on our horsemanship journey, and this includes artists who have generously contributed their illustrations and photographs to our book and/or this website. We will continually add to this list below of our current visual artist contributors.
Lara Matiisen, Next To Wild Photography
We first met Lara when she became a fellow boarder at Hawkstone Stables in 2018. After chatting with her, we found out that she is also a talented equine photographer and we asked her to take photographs of our herd on a couple of occasions before coming up with our book project idea. She is the owner of Next To Wild Photography, a photography service dedicated to celebrating your furred, feathered and scaly family members, and highlighting the connection between them and their humans. We have been continually impressed with her professionalism and down to earth nature, and we’d like to thank her for her enthusiasm about our book project, Sharing The Now: Mindfulness Exercises to Enhance the Connection with Your Horse. The photographs on this website are created by her, unless otherwise stated.
Nicole Toren, Hand Gallop Studio
Nicole contributed all of the watercolour designs and technical diagrams to our upcoming book project, Sharing The Now: Mindfulness Exercises to Enhance the Connection with Your Horse. We first met Nicole through her business, Tonic Equestrian, and purchasing items from the line, including amazing artwork from Hand Gallop Studio. She also completed a commissioned portrait of Stella for Shreyasi a few months prior. When we approached her about this project, she was excited to help and we are so grateful for her visual talents! She has crafted stunning imagery for the ideas we want to portray to the world and captured what we find so significant in being connected to our horses. The logo and art on this website are created by her, unless otherwise stated. As a graphic designer and artist, she creates original artwork and design, custom branding, small business print and offers marketing and editorial solutions through her company, Hand Gallop Studio. She is also co-owner of Tonic Equestrian in Sherwood Park, a retail company celebrating the unique lifestyle and outlook of the Equestrian Nation.
Nancy is a wonderfully kind and generous lady with whom we first connected through Facebook, when we first heard of her unique equestrian art. She has created several unique commissions of our horses, including Stella and Grace, over the years. In fact, one of her Stella images was inspiration for Shreyasi’s watercolor tattoo (among others)! We were privileged to visit her home-based studio in Arizona earlier this year, and spent a wonderful afternoon with her and her husband discussing and viewing her art. As per her website, she works exclusively in watermedia art in a process she developed called “Inner Painting”. Her colorful, highly textured horse original paintings reflect her life-long love of horses and speaks to the power and energy she connects with when painting them. Besides her horse art, she also creates original floral and abstract paintings, which reveal her underlying romance with color combinations and subtleties of textures found in nature. She has been teaching and exhibiting her artwork for the past thirty plus years. Nancy has generously provided us permission to include JPEG images of the artwork we have purchased from her thus far, including the illustration Spirits Transcending, from the blog post Horses Can Help Us Heal.