Horses From Somewhere Else is a body of work born from a deeply intuitive process in which Christian Hook creates without reference, allowing images to emerge entirely from his subconscious. The series title reflects his sense that these forms come from a place beyond conscious thought, what he describes as a silent conversation with his own imagination.
The process begins with random marks on an iPad. Hook starts drawing with no predetermined subject, allowing his subconscious to make the decisions. Once he recognises a form appearing in the abstract patterns — a horse, a figure, a gesture — he follows it. Drawing on what he describes as a form of pictorial memory, he found he could render subjects he had never directly observed, including a blue horse he had never seen yet knew exactly how to paint once the image surfaced in his mind.
Several works in the series carry the title Moksha, a Sanskrit term for liberation or enlightenment drawn from the yogic system's sixteen parts of the mind. It is a fitting name for paintings that are themselves acts of creative liberation — made without constraint, without reference, and without forcing the image to be any particular thing. The digital sketches are printed onto textured paper using gel mediums, then worked over with traditional oils and mixed media, pushing each piece beyond its digital origins into something richly physical.
The result is a series that captures not the appearance of the horse but its energy and motion — the visuals of transition rendered through Hook's signature layered style. Within the broader arc of his practice, Horses From Somewhere Else represents a pivotal moment of creative discovery, one that opened an entirely new mode of working that would carry forward into the Arabian Hybrids series and beyond.
2024 · 4 works
Hybrid 1 · Mixed media on paper
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