“I have been an artist since childhood but haven’t always
pursued art the way I am doing now,” says Helen Bailey.
In her senior year of high school, she won a year’s
scholarship to art school but only stayed for a year and a
half. They taught fundamentals which she needed but
the realism which she admired was frowned upon by the
teachers.

Her love of horses has also been since childhood. She
lived across the street from a county fairgrounds where
horses were boarded almost year round. And she spent
most of her time there drawing horses. Teenage pursuits
eventually pulled her away from the fairgrounds but the
love of horses and drawing never left her.

After leaving school she got married, raised a family and
dabbled in art once in a while. When she retired she
found the time to pursue her interests in horses and art.
In 2004 she finally bought her first horse, a Quarter
Horse mare named Nifty who has been the subject of her
drawings as well as her faithful trail riding companion.
But it wasn’t until almost 4 years ago when a friend told
her about a colored pencil class taught by Linda Lucas
Hardy that she found a medium that was everything she
wanted as an artistic expression. This charismatic
teacher was able to bring out things she’d never
dreamed were possible with colored pencil. Helen found
it hard to believe that Linda’s work was done in colored
pencil, since it looked like oil or acrylic painting. She has
been a student of Linda’s since then.

Helen has subscribed to Horses In Art for 3 or 4 years
now and saw Shirley Isola’s work in the Winter of 2007
issue. After emailing Shirley about how much she
admired her horses, Helen asked if she would be willing
to come to McKinney, TX to teach a workshop. One of
Helen’s pictures is a result of that workshop, the one she
calls “Royalty.” Helen had never heard of using the
matboard surface to draw on, instead of using it to frame
your pictures. Shirley not only used matboard, she used
Gamsol with the colored pencil to deepen and intensify
the colors. This was quite a discovery for Helen and the
other members of the workshop. Shirley also showed
them her work on Crescent Moorman suede matboard.
That is the surface Helen used to do the foal in “Hello
World.” It’s a shade called “moccasin.” She feels indebted
to Shirley for the information she learned from her.

A friend named Jamie Cangelose who is a skilled
photographer has a ranch nearby and let some of her
friends come out and take pictures as source material for
horse paintings. It turned out that this friend is a better
photographer than Helen is, so her photos were used in
both “Hello World” and “Watching the Rain.”

Helen feels that it has taken time for her technique and
skill with colored pencil to develop to this point and that
this is just the beginning for her.