Intro:

Madeleine Bunbury knew what she wanted early on, and it wasn’t what anyone else expected. After bombing her high school exams and getting kicked out, she found her way to a classical art school in Florence where she trained to paint portraits, then as soon as she could started painting horses instead.

In this episode, we talk about how she went from couch-surfing in exchange for paintings to traveling the world with a homemade easel and a dream.

She paints every horse from life, often life-size, and always with the same goal: to capture something deeper than a photo ever could.

Key topics we discussed in 5 bullet points:

• The very non-linear path from failed science student to classically-trained artist living out of a suitcase and painting horses for a living.
• What “site size” painting means and why she never paints from photographs, only from horses standing right next to the canvas.
• The heartbreak and hilarity of trying to get high-strung sport horses to stand still for hours in the blazing sun.
• Her mission to document the 18 native British horse breeds before they disappear, starting with a life-size Suffolk Punch on a three-meter canvas.

Subscribe to the Horse People Podcast for more cross-discipline content. And if you want to follow Madeleine’s adventures across the world, give her a follow: @bunbury_equine_art

Want to learn more about her exhibition in Virginia, here's the link: National Sporting Library and Museum