Erika Tully noticed that her horse, Blue, liked to grab things with his mouth.
“Horses don’t usually tear or bite,” says Tully, 57, of Carolina Beach, North Carolina. “They don’t try to bite, but that’s how they pick things up. And he’s a horse that will pick up a hose if it’s in a trough of water. If you walk by with a broom, he’ll try to grab the broomstick.”
Tully adopted the 21-year-old off-track thoroughbred, a former racehorse, three years ago.
“He melts my heart,” she says.
Tully is an artist herself who creates works using pieces of ties and eventually wondered if her horse shared her artistic talent. So last fall, she stuck a paintbrush to a carrot and picked up a canvas.
“It was almost like he just knew he had to put in some punches,” she says. Every so often, she would break off a carrot and he would eat it while it changed colors for him.
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Blue painting horse.
Erika Tully
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“In the end, it was like he wasn’t even thinking about the carrot, he was just thinking about the picture,” she adds now of his process. – Sometimes we paint for five days in a row.
He displays his artwork at his business, Neapolitan Wine Shop, and sells his paintings online at his website, Eclectic Dandelion.
“We’re running out of pictures,” she says. – He sold a lot.
To date, Blue has sold a dozen works – and each painting comes with a photo of him painting.
“There’s always bits of dirt and hair in his paintings because sometimes he’ll drop his brush,” she says. So customers “don’t just get paint — they get a little collage.”
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He likes painting even more than riding, says Tully.
“He starts laughing when he sees me because he thinks he’s going to go paint,” she says. “Make everyone in the barn smile!”
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Source: HIS Education