Introduction to Cowgirl Rising: The Art of Donna Howell Sickles

Introduction to Cowgirl Rising: The Art of Donna Howell Sickell

By Peg Streep; Introduction by Teresa Jordan

Greenwich Workshop Press, 1997

Some years ago, when I first encountered Donna Howell-Sickles joyful and expansive cowgirls, I felt a jolt of both comfort and recognition. They touched something deep inside me — deeper, really, than I could explain. It is only now, looking at so many images gathered here in one place, that I begin to understand the connection.

In the isolated ranch community where I grew up, there were few girls my age, so I mostly played with my older brother and his friends. I was a typical tomboy. I played cowboys and Indians, I wrestled, I swore. When I was with boys, we rode horses. But sometimes I had girls to play with, and then things changed. We actually became horses, and I can still remember those magical moments of transcendence when we first urged our horses into comfortable lopes. I was a chubby child but my awkwardness fell away when I rode and I felt sleek and strong and graceful.

Girls and horses have a special bond. I remember a college friend, a psychology major, once telling me this connection is Freudian, which is to say sexual. He went on to suggest that the reason many girls grow away from horses in adolescence is that the sexuality becomes too obvious, too embarrassing. In later years, after their marriages have cooled, women often find their interest in horses reignited.

I listened to my friend, but I didn’t believe him. Horses are beautiful and strong and certainly there is something erotic about them. But if it were a matter of — I still remember his phrase: “that throbbing manlife between the legs” — girls would be drawn to motorcycles.

I suspect that girls bond with horses because horses don’t diminish them. Horses don’t coo over them because they are cute, or shun them because they aren’t cute enough. They don’t judge them for being too rowdy or too quiet, too skinny or too fat. Horses respond to something deeper, to essence and intention. When a ninety-pound girl and a nine-hundred-pound horse canter through a reining pattern together, they have developed a mutual respect and honest communication that few girls can find anywhere else.

When I was around horses — and most particularly when I was alone with them — I felt beautiful and competent, as if I embodied their animal ease. Away from them, I was often confused by the mixed messages that every girl receives. (Boys receive mixed messages, too, though the messages are different). My parents encouraged me to become as competent outdoors as my brother, and yet I also understood that I must be more quiet about that competence than he, just as in the classroom I shouldn’t raise my hand too quickly or let it be known if I had aced a test. I watched my Great Aunt Marie manage her ranch with a similar subterfuge. When her husband John was home and would line out the day’s work, he might say “Floyd, why don’t you do this; Mel, you do that.” But Marie would never be so direct. “What do you think we ought to do today?” she’d ask. And if the men didn’t suggest what she thought needed doing, she’d tenderly, mysteriously, nudge the conversation around until they came up with the idea she had in mind all along. In the world where I was raised, a woman could do anything she wanted as long as nobody noticed.

Horses play by different rules. It’s not that they don’t let you know if your behavior is inappropriate, if you scare them or do something stupid. But you don’t have to hide how good you are, or how strong. You can be as competent as you are able.

I think it was this world of comfort with animals that lay behind the shock of recognition I felt when I first encountered Donna Howell-Sickles’ work. Her cowgirls are the beautiful, wholesome women I dreamed as a girl I might grow into. Confident and strong, they move without apology or the need for permission. At ease with animals and with themselves, they are also at home with other women, and with men: all this without denying their essential womanness. There is a great equality in these paintings, and a great freedom. They fill me with joy. They also fill me with hope. If we can imagine this world, we can attain it. Donna’s paintings show me that we are already well on the way.

©1997 The Greenwich Workshop, Inc.

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