The artist doing what she loves most: chasing wild horses.

Noble, majestic, powerful, beautiful ... it is these qualities of horses that Karen Keene Day sees, and through her paintings, reveals their spirituality in a Celebration of Life through color & movement. In their strong family units in the wild or alone, running free or standing still, Karen paints them with rich colors, free of tack and rider.

Her paintings have beeen shown at Piccolo Spoleto Outdoor Art Exhibit in 2006, 2004, 2003 & 2002.  

Karen Keene Day’s paintings of horses in pastels, acrylics, and water-colors, have traveled across the United States, and to Spain, to shows, businesses and clients’ homes. Her paintings have been featured in horse magazines Equine Image, Andalusian and Conquistador, including several covers on Andalusian magazine. Karen has been extensively covered by Equine Image, who also represented her at Equitana, an International Horse Show, in Louisville, Kentucky and Wildlife Art Magazine. The artist has given workshops, slide shows and presentations to business groups, artists’ associations and school children.

Karen travels to photograph horses for her paintings, and to find inspiration. This has included trips to study the wild horses of the Pryor Mountains on the border of Wyoming and Montana, the Little Bookcliff Horses of DeBeque, Colorado and wild Marsh horses of the Carolina and Georgia Shores.

Since 2003 the focus of Day's wild horse research has been in Disappointment Valley with the Spring Creek Herd, located between Norwood and Durango,Colorado. She and her husband live in Ouray,Colorado in summers, a two hour drive from where the horses live in the wild. In late summer of 2007 Day went to the Bureau of Land Management Roundup to witness herds being driven by helicopter into traps, along with a team of photographers, filmmaker, and newspaper reporters.

A few days later in Cortez,Co. she watched a wild horse trainer go through the process of gentling young horses that had been brought in from the round up. Some are sent to Cortez for training and adoption. Others go to Canon City Prison in Canon City,Colorado, to be trained by prisoners in the gentling program. Many are adopted, and some go to be a part of the Northern USA border patrol. Many sold for slaughter are transported in cattle trucks to Mexico and Canada to be killed, and then sent to be consumed by people in other countries that consider them a delicacy.

It is the artist's fervent hope, and the reason behind her painting wild horses, that people's awareness of the plight of wild horses will be raised; raised to tell their senators and congressional representatives they want the final bill passed now, that will permanently ban the slaughter of horses in the USA as well as the transportation of the horses to foreign countries for slaughter.
A one woman show in February 2007 highlighted new paintings from this round up.

3% of Day's half of her sales go the National Mustang Association branch in Durango, specifically to help the Spring Creek Herd of Disappointment Valley.

Click here for more information on wild horses.