Ready to Ride: On Memory, Making, and the Year of the Horse

I am six years old, and the height of culinary extravagance is when my mom says we are going to the Chinese
restaurant in the next town and we’ll be able to get a pu pu platter. (I am today years old when I realize it is not,
in fact, a “poo poo platter.”)

I’m not sure what is more delightful – the little flame in the middle of the egg rolls and shrimp or the fact that we
get to say “poo poo” on repeat.

The menus feature the Chinese zodiac, where you can find your birth year and see what animal it corresponds
to. I am the rooster: observant, hardworking, honest, and proud. My sister is the goat: creative, compassionate,
gentle-mannered, and thoughtful.

We check our status every time as though it isn’t the same exact leather-bound menu each visit. 1981 will
always be the rooster.

Many years later, the restaurant where we celebrated so many report cards and birthdays burns down, and I’ve still
never had another pu pu platter.

It’s January 2026, and I’m in the midst of my annual 31 paintings in 31 days project. I have painted
approximately three thousand birds, and out of nowhere, I am suddenly enamored with horses.

Large, grounded, often friendly, they seem almost the opposite of a bird.

Who has this rooster become?

I paint several of them that month, each time becoming more interested in the negative shapes created by the
slanted line of the neck, the thick triangle of a thigh connecting to the rest of the leg. What starts as a way to
explore the expression “on her high horse” becomes an interest in shapes and lines, abstraction and
unapologetic power.

When the project ends, I hear on a podcast that 2026 is the Year of the Horse, whatever that means.
Days later, I connect “Year of the Horse” back to those Chinese menus at my family’s favorite restaurant.
Turns out the horse is independent, high-spirited, energetic, and loves freedom.

What rooster doesn’t aspire to that?

Coincidence or not, more than halfway through 2026, I’m still finding joy in the image of the horse.

Ready to Ride was born from a small series of paintings I created in acrylic instead of oil because I was
experiencing asthma symptoms I thought might be coming from my solvents. (Great news: they weren’t.)

It was spring, and I was interested in capturing some of the bright, lush beauty I was witnessing all around me.
The flowers were in bloom, and so was my desire to find my way with a medium I hadn’t used in a decade.

The horses scratched into the vase came as a surprise.

Oh, hello again.

It was as though they were saying, You’ll get through this, too. Keep going.

I’m starting to suspect that the very reason I love painting so much is the sense it gives me that I’m always
being carried by something larger than myself.

I’m not ready to say I’ve graduated from my long-standing bird era into my Year of the Horse.

But I am saying that even an old dog – faithful, protective, honest, and completely trustworthy – can learn new
tricks.

And maybe that’s one of the gifts of making things for a long time: realizing that nothing is ever entirely left
behind.

A childhood restaurant. A leather-bound menu. A rooster. Horses that appear unexpectedly in the side of a
vase.

Memory is one of the richest raw materials we have. We carry more of it than we realize, and every so often
something we thought was long gone pushes its way back through the surface.

Not exactly the same.

Something new growing from old soil.

Ready to ride.