Unbridled Artistry: Petaluma horse paints vivid abstracts

“Yellow or green, Johnnie? Yellow or green?”

On a hot Friday morning on the east side of Petaluma, painter Katherine Sidjakov stands in front of Johnnie, a four-year-old Gypsy vanner horse. As the immaculately groomed animal studies her, Sidjakov holds up two plastic bottles, with two different colors of paint.

“Sometimes I pick the colors, sometimes Johnnie picks the colors,” explains Sidjakov, Johnnie’s trainer and, twice a week, his art teacher, too. Poised and alert on the other side of the corral fence, Johnnie watches Sidjakov intently, as the two bottles are moved to within touching distance. After a brief pause, the horse steps forward and bumps his muzzle against the green bottle.

“Green? You want green?” she asks.

Johnnie is sticking with his decision.

"Green it is,“ affirms Sidjakov, moving to a nearby spot where an easel has been set up for Johnnie’s morning art session.

“Johnnie also tells me ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’ with anything he wants to do or doesn’t want to do,” Sidjakov says, pouring some of the paint into a couple of small plastic bowls. “He’s very opinionated, and you can see it in his painting. He paints with a lot of energy. He paints with all of his emotions. He’s the Jackson Pollock of horses.”

Just beyond the easel stands a large storage shed/carport. It’s an atypical spot for a fancy art show, but this weekend’s exhibition at Dairydale Ranch in Petaluma will be anything but typical.

Johnnie has been painting with Sidjakov for about 2.5 years.

Johnnie’s owner, local author and dog-trainer Camilla Gray-Nelson — founder, president and director of training at Dairydale Doggie Dude Ranch & Training Center — calls the pair “an amazing team.”

“When you watch Johnnie paint, it’s obvious how much he enjoys it, and how strong the relationship between him and Kathy is,” Gray-Nelson says.

Considered one of the most beautiful horses in the world, the Gypsy vanner is a domestic breed originating in Ireland and parts of Great Britain. The flowing mane and feathery hair of the Gypsy vanner’s tail and lower legs gives the horse a fairytale quality, which is often enhanced by tying the hair into braids. Named after its traditional employment in pulling wheeled nomadic caravans, the small, strong animal has also sometimes been known as the Irish cob, the Galineers cob and simply the Gypsy horse.

“Their manes can grow down to their knees, which is part of why we braid his hair, and to keep it from knotting and breaking,” says Gray-Nelson, who owns four Gypsy vanners.

“But only one of them is an artist,” she says with a smile.

Johnnie’s “horse nanny,” Kathy Cline, is primarily responsible for keeping Johnnie and the other horses looking so spiffy.

“There’s a lot of glamour upkeep, as you can imagine!” Gray Nelson says. “And yes, Johnnie does get paint on himself, just like he gets bits of his own saliva, and dirt and straw and things, onto the paintings. That’s part of what makes them unique. He’s a mixed-media artist.”

Gray-Nelson, whose books include “Lipstick and the Leash: Dog Training a Woman’s Way” and the recent “Cracking the Harmony Code: Nature’s Surprising Secrets for Getting Along While Getting Your Way,” has had Johnnie since he was a colt. He recently turned 8.

“I had great plans for him to be a riding horse and a carriage-driving horse, but it turns out he wouldn’t have either one of them,” she explains. “He’d buck everybody off. He’d have nothing to do with the carriage. So I had to find his lane, something that Johnnie actually wanted to do.”

After hiring Sidjakov — an experienced Hollywood animal trainer and the owner of Animal Stars Training — to teach Johnnie some tricks in hopes that such activities might be more up his alley, they accidentally discovered the horse’s alacrity for art.

“He’s a smart horse with a bright personality,” said Gray-Nelson. “And in the teaching of various tricks, we found that he liked holding things in his mouth. He’s very oral. And jokingly, we said, ‘We should teach him to hold a paintbrush, and teach him to paint!’ Little did we know, he was a natural.”

In truth, it wasn’t quite so simple as that, Gray-Nelson acknowledges. There were no existing paint bushes designed for the mouth of a horse, so a number of experimental prototypes had to be designed on the way to developing a brush Johnnie is both comfortable with and gives him enough control once the actual painting commences.

“He always liked holding wooden dowels, in his trick training,” Gray-Nelson says, “so I modified a paintbrush, sawing off the regular handle and screwing it onto a wooden dowel.”

Various lengths and thicknesses were attempted and discarded on the way to developing something suited to Johnnie’s facial physiology, temperament and personal tastes. “And that,” she says, “is how we came up with Johnnie’s paintbrushes.”

It did not take the artsy equine long to develop his own unique style, an engaged and energetic, highly physical painting process resulting in vibrant abstract paintings good enough to convince panels of artists that the work is that of a human artist. Gray-Nelson proudly tells the story of submitting Johnnie’s work to a prestigious art show, along with a resume describing the artist’s mouth-painting approach, but omitting the part about the applicant being a horse.

“People see the paintings and get very excited. They send us an enthusiastic acceptance, thinking they’ve found the next great artist — and then when we tell them Johnnie is a Gypsy vanner horse, they just quietly rescind their invitation,” Gray-Nelson says with a mischievous grin. “I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want a painting horse in their show. Can you imagine how popular that could be? Anyway, that’s why we decided to give Johnnie his own art show, right here this weekend.”

The show will feature a hanging display of the horse’s most impressive works, and will include a demonstration by Johnnie, similar to what he’s preparing to do this morning.

“At first we used stretched canvas, but we had to switch to panel board because he was so exuberant he was breaking through the canvases,” says Gray-Nelson.

In addition to learning how to use a brush, Johnnie has had to adapt to working in color.

“Horses don’t see color the way we see color,” says Sidjakov. “If you are doing tonalities from white to black, there are all the tones of gray. Horses see that, but in blues and yellows. They are missing the red tones, so Johnnie interprets red as a particular tone, but he can apparently tell it apart from other colors.”

A fine art painter herself, Sidjakov describes Johnnie’s paintings as a collaboration between the two of them. She provides an initial undercoat, and Johnnie adds layer upon layer of additional paint.

“Then we stand back and look at it,” she says. “We decide together when the painting is finished.”

A large piece can take months to complete, notes Sidjakov. Like many human artists, Johnnie will sometimes go through phases where he appears to be exploring similar color combinations, and even detectable themes. For example, the art that will be on display this Sunday includes triptych based on the Kincade fire.

“The first was done in September of 2019, three weeks before the Kincade fire,” Gray-Nelson explains, noting that the smoke and the glow from the conflagration could be seen and smelled strongly in Petaluma. “We call the first painting ‘Premonition’ because it really does resemble flames rising from dry grass,” she says. The next painting in the series, titled “Fire,” a chaotic explosion of red and orange, was painted in October, as the glow of the threatening blaze lit up the sky beyond Johnnie’s stable. The final piece, named “Aftermath,” and painted in November, is a tangle of char-gray splinters on a background of orange and yellow.

The simple, paint-spattered easel, to which Sidjakov is now leading Johnnie, is weighted down with sandbags, to keep the horse from accidentally knocking it over in a heightened moment of painterly ebullience.

And yes, it’s happened.

“The things you learn when you have a painting horse, I can’t even believe it sometimes,” laughs Gray-Nelson.

Johnnie, now in place before the easel, opens his mouth to receive the brush that Sidjakov has offered him. She’s already dipped the brush in green paint, and without hesitation, the horse leans toward the prepared panel board and makes a vigorous diagonal sweep upwards from the bottom left corner.

“Yes, Johnnie! That’s right!” she exclaims, making it clear that Johnnie is at least partially motivated by words of praise, and the occasional treat Sidjakov offers him from time to time. “Oh, very pretty, Johnnie! Paint it Johnnie! Yes, Johnnie! Oh, look at you go! Good job! Good job, Johnnie!”

After a minute, Johnnie stops, waiting for the brush to be refilled with paint. On occasion, he does drop the brush onto the ground by accident. Eventually, with a vigorous nod in response to his teachers question about being ready for another color, Johnnie switches to yellow, and adds several bright swirls. Gradually, one color at a time, a vibrant painting emerges.

“Sometimes, he uses very strong, bold brush strokes, really dynamic imagery,” Gray-Nelson remarks, her voice hushed so as not to break the artist’s concentration. “Other times he uses these soft, gentle, fluttery strokes, just barely stroking the painting. It all depends on his mood.”

A moment later, Johnnie stops again.

“Shall we step back and look at it?” asks Sidjakov, receiving the brush from Johnnie and moving a few feet away. “What do you think? Does it need some more?”

With a strong nod, Johnnie apparently says “yes,” and steps back to the easel, ready for more, this time working the top part of the panel board.

“Oh, good idea, Johnnie! You’re so right! Paint it, Johnnie! Good boy Johnnie!”

With a contented sigh, Gray-Nelson nods toward her star artist intensely at work on his next one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

“It’s so inspiring,” she says. “It really is. I look at Johnnie sometimes and think, ‘If you can do that, and do it with so much passion and emotion,’ what’s our excuse for not pursuing the things we dream of?’”