CAN'T DRAW HORSES

Fortunately, Maurice Sendak couldn't draw horses.  

His contract required him to illustrate a children's book called Where the Wild Horses Are, but no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't draw horses well.  Sendak struggled and struggled, then in one creative leap he substituted wild things for wild horses, and the story took off from there.

Where the Wild Things Are became a landmark in the history of children's literature, a seminal work that inspired an opera and a feature film and sold over 20 million copies around the world.  It made Sendak's legacy.

The artist Jackson Pollock couldn't draw horses either.

Pollock wanted to be a representational painter.  He struggled to paint horses but could never get them quite right.

In 1947 Pollock told a friend, artist Harry Jackson, that he'd tried to paint a mural of stampeding horses to satisfy an important commission but lacked the discipline or skill. 

Finally “he got mad,” Harry recalled Pollock saying, “and started to sling the paint onto the canvas to create the driving, swirling action and thrust the composition and the heroic size demanded.”  Pollock's frustration over his inability to paint horses fueled a creative leap to a revolutionary abstract expressionist painting.  He abandoned horses and pioneered a style with all of the energy but none of the representational constraints.

The mural gave the art world a jolt.  The art critic Clement Greenberg wrote: "I took one look at it and I thought, 'Now that's great art,' and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced."

Susan Rothenberg couldn't draw horses either, but by that time nobody gave a damn.  

Rothenberg painted in an era when artists no longer needed to feel shame.  She painted horses like this and she painted them real big, with oversized confidence:

The art critic for The New Yorker crowed about the "asteroidal impact" of Ms. Rothenberg's horse pictures:

[T]he effect of the horse paintings that Rothenberg sprang on the world in 1975... was like an asteroid impact....her huge paintings in acrylics made some of us laugh with sheer wonderment....The works conveyed anger, exaltation, and self-abandoning intrepidity. 

Sendak and Pollock recognized that their inability to draw horses was a serious problem.  If they did a crappy job, it would be widely recognized as such, so they twisted and turned and used their imaginations to explore creative, unorthodox alternatives. 

Rothenberg was not flogged to higher creativity by a similar sense of shame or self-doubt, and her work reflects it.