Lucy Hogg

November, 2007

The Last Pony project is a meditation on the end of painting, at least the end of it for
Lucy Hogg. Her image of a horse poised at the edge of a cliff is based on Whistlejacket
by George Stubbs (c. 1762). Stubbs, at the request of his original patron, had left the
background blank. Into that void Hogg has inserted the landscape from an earlier
equestrian painting by Diego Velasquez, his Phillip IV on Horseback (c. 1634). The
Spanish monarch's reign has striking similarities to the second Bush administration.
Riderless, the horse is about to plunge into the unknown. The figure represents either
the epitome of autonomous action or a fearful flight.

Hogg's longstanding photographic interests are now merging with painterly ones that
are receding. Working with a scan of a photograph of her equestrian painting, she
realized the wide array of color schemes she could have used for the original. The
computer, that is, provided options – "colorways" to use a term from commercial textile
production– that were unavailable in a traditional studio.

Once photographed, the white elephant of the museum-scaled history painting becomes
artefact, documented in its last natural habitat of the studio, before it is unstretched and
rolled away for storage. As a digital scan it becomes still further reproducible and
customizable; the formerly unique object, already twice removed from its original
authors, Velesquez and Stubbs, is domesticated for democratic consumption.