If you think of the old cowboy pictures that we watched, or I watched on TV when I was a kid, the best parts are when the horses are there. Because sometimes, when they get the posse together in town, there’s like 20 horses. And all these horse heads are up in the air and the guy’s saying, “We’re going to get this son of a bitch! We’ve got to get him. He’s out of town.” But there’s something about the horses in those movies that make them so special.
And It’s that horse opera thing that I was thinking about, and partly in terms of childhood, in that we grow up thinking that one day we’ll have a horse and a place that we keep it and a little gun. And it turns out instead we’re sorting letters at the post office. It’s a painting of a great deal about pleasure. I think that I came to that later in life, really. Why not do something that you really like, that really expresses your love of children, your love of the delight that we take in our families, the delight that we take in children’s discoveries, and our perceiving what they see?