David Marquis

Walk up close and you look at the horse for instance, and just look at all of the colors that the artist has used in defining and creating that horse. There are not just tints and shades, there are many, many colors placed juxtaposed to each other to create that really deep luminous flesh tone of the horse.

He makes it look easy; he makes it look like he knocked this out in an hour. But when you really start paying attention and looking at it close, you realize, oh my god this is very complex. He doesn’t want you to see that effort. He wants that – he wants it to look like it just happened in moments. And he happened upon this scene.

This is almost circular to me, I mean when I look at Arabs Skirmishing, I see a very circular, my eye goes like up to the blue of the sky down through the horses, up through the figures on the right side and just keeps going like this and your eye never rests. It just keeps moving and I find that it’s a lovely thing. It’s like this snapshot, frozen in time but the narrative continues, the action continues, and he is just taking a snapshot and it’s all still happening, that’s the feeling that I get when I look at it.