Rider with Horses and Dog: A Writing Competition

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.

I often imagine a thought-bubble above the head of the rider in this picture.
He could be thinking all sorts of things: “Almost home”; “How will I break the news to her?”; “Maybe I should stop here for the night”; “Will they ever forgive me?”; “It’s so lonely returning alone”; “I wonder if the horse-dealer cheated me”; “I’m tired”; “Who’s that running to meet me?” Each of these possibilities – and innumerable others – has the potential to act as a key to unlock whatever real-life story is pictured, or to begin a narrative that incorporates this image into a piece of fiction.
But sometimes I imagine the thought-bubble saying: “Oh no, not more writers!”
Let me explain.
I use this image in creative writing workshops. Because it’s something I’ve written about myself, I’m always interested to see how it strikes other writers. Most recently, I used the painting as a visual prompt at an OCA/Arvon writing course at Lumb Bank. It elicited some fascinating responses.
Three things occurred to me soon after returning from Lumb Bank:
• I regretted not being more careful to keep material sparked by this image. Cumulatively, it has the potential to make an interesting book.
• Why not experiment with using it in the wider context of the OCA blog?
• Why not encourage people to write about it by tying its blog-appearance to a competition?
So, OCA is offering a £100 Amazon gift card for the best piece of writing sparked by the painting and posted on this blog within two months of today’s date.
It might be a short story, or a piece of creative nonfiction, the beginning of a novel, or a poem, or some flash-fiction. Or it might be something that doesn’t fit neatly into any of these categories – perhaps a fragment of stream-of-consciousness that gives insight into the rider’s mind, or an entry taken from the artist’s personal diary about working on the painting, or the scene read from the dog’s perspective.
As with its use in face-to-face workshops, I’ll provide some background, though not much – simply because I don’t know a lot about the painting.
It measures 97.5 cm x 77.5 cm (including a gold coloured wooden frame – not pictured – that’s 5.5 cm wide). It’s signed, but the artist’s name is hard to make out. It could be “R Bach” (or maybe “Buch”). Beside the name, on the lower right-hand corner, there’s also a date – 1869. This is legible in the original but not in the image reproduced here. On the back of the canvas there’s a faded ink stamp. Only one word of what it says is clear, “Munchen”, suggesting the possibility of German provenance. But I don’t know where the place that’s pictured is, or if it’s somewhere real – with an actual rider, horses and dog passing by – or if it exists only in the imagination of the artist. What I do know is that the painting dominated one room in the Country Antrim house where I grew up, and it likewise dominated a room in my father’s childhood home in Londonderry. Apparently his younger brother surreptitiously added the cigar the rider is smoking.
There’s no expectation that any of these details will appear in what you write. There needs to be some link between the painting and the piece of writing it sparks. Other than that, you have a completely free hand.
For information: My “How to See a Horse” first appeared in Orion magazine (November/December 2004, pp.36-40). It was subsequently included in Irish Haiku (2005). Two quotes help identify what this essay attempts:
“Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes things visible.” (Paul Klee)
“Poetry takes off the veil. It reveals the amazing things that surround us and which our senses usually register mechanically.” (Jean Cocteau)
“How to see a Horse” tries to make visible some of the amazing things around us. It tries to move beyond mechanical registering to a more in-depth way of seeing. It takes the painting as its point of departure, but weaves around it a wide-ranging meditation that moves beyond childhood memories to consider how horses can be pictured as they exist across time. Included in this piece are mentions of, among other things: the ashvamedha – horse sacrifice – described in Hinduism’s oldest scripture, the Rig Veda; the differences between representation and reality – how the word “horse” and the painting of a horse are far removed from what they point to; Peter Shaffer’s play Equus; the Buddha’s horse Kanthaka; cat-sized fossil horses and microscopic embryo horses; Magritte’s famous drawing of a pipe across which is written “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”…….
What will be included in your piece of writing? What form will it take? What will this painting lure from your imagination onto the page?
The small print: Work in any genre is accepted. There are no length restrictions, but please be reasonable – and remember the advice given in Strunk & White’s classic guide to good writing, Elements of Style:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
Judging will be undertaken by the curriculum leader for creative writing in the first instance. Depending on the number of entries, other creative writing tutors may be involved in the selection process. The closing date is 7 July 2013.  To enter, simply email your piece to competitions@oca-uk.com. make sure you head the email OCA writing competition. Only one entry per student is permitted. In the unlikely event of there being no entry of sufficient quality, OCA reserves the right not to award the prize – or, should it seem appropriate, to split the prize between two or more entrants. Please direct any enquiries to: enquiries@oca-uk.com.