Horses. I’ll start with a confession of sorts. Until around the age of twelve I dreamed of a life with horses. At weekends I rode at stables on the outskirts of London; the rest of the week I plotted how I would one day keep horses and ride whenever I wanted. Then came a resolute yet remorseful dividing of the ways, of a kind familiar in early adolescence. Overnight my horse pictures gave way to art posters from Habitat; Elements of Riding was banished under the bed, to be replaced by the earnest black spines of Penguin Classics. By the time I’d graduated to Swann’s Way and Psychopathology of Everyday Life, I blushed to think that I had once yearned to spend my days amid the loosebox smells of hay breath and hoof oil. I could not imagine Proust or Freud soaping their tack or scraping the sweat from a lathered flank. The life of the mind – or my idea of it – seemed to demand the renunciation of all things horsey. So when Judy Buxton describes the ‘ghosting’ effect of her large painting Grey Horse Downland Romance 1961, in which a striding animal appears alternately to emerge from and recede into the myriad brush marks’ changeable weather, there is also for me a ghost of passion remembered – a Proustian moment, in its way.

For those who know Buxton’s work well, on the other hand – who will think of her primarily as a landscape artist – the drawings and paintings of horses she has been making over the past year or so feel very much like a new departure, with all the exploratory fervour of a passion discovered. If this is true in artistic terms, however, there is also more to it than meets the eye – an ancestral dimension that’s suggested by the title of this show. Buxton explains that her father, who died when she was five, was a horse-racing commentator on Australian radio. Further back in family lore, he was a young man driving across the outback in his horse and trap. ‘Coming from Australia’, she says, ‘I suppose I’m naturally interested in my family roots.’ Her genealogical researches have revealed, among other things, that her English great-grandfather was a cavalryman in the Sherwood Forest Rangers. Buxton’s first childhood drawings were of horses; later, marooned in England without her passport, she found work as a stable hand in the Lake District and Cornwall.

A few years ago, searching for a pony for her young daughter, Buxton inadvertently re-entered the domain of the horse; this time round, it has become a serious involvement – not just weekend riding but breeding, showing, the whole equestrian vocation. I’m reminded of the qualified emphasis with which Patrick Heron referred to his garden above Zennor as ‘very nearly the greatest passion of my life’. And, like the azaleas at Eagles Nest, the horses have irresistibly crossed the threshold into paint. To be more exact, it was the genealogical side of breeding – ancestral researches of a different kind – that attuned Buxton to a possible new direction for her work. Digital technology played an interesting role here: equine bloodlines are now accessible online, and, like prime ministers and their families, a surprising number of the animals to be seen in paddocks and gymkhanas around the country trace their descent to seventeenth-century aristocratic circles. More intriguing still, when you click on some of the historic names, paintings and prints appear on screen: Hanoverian thoroughbreds and Victorian hunters stand squarely in picturesque vistas or, as fashions changed, rear Delacroix-style in bravura proof of Arab blood.

At this point, I think, you have to set aside two prominent aspects of the English tradition of horse painting. The first, derived from George Stubbs, has to do with anatomical glamour, the deep-bedded power of flesh and muscle. The other is about the parade of possession – the horse as privileged tenant of an owned landscape. Buxton’s horses have little dialogue with either; it makes more sense, in fact, to see them as an evolutionary branch of landscape tachisme. In the vivid accumulation of brush marks, an atmospheric sense of physical immersion elides with a more detached awareness of spatial and temporal distance: the matière of paint becomes matter for thought, and vice versa. You can almost watch this two-way process happening on a table in Buxton’s studio, which is covered with A4 printouts from the bloodline website – not ranked in genealogical order but piled, shuffled, bruised and flecked with pigment like autumn leaves. Here and there the clear arch of a neck, sinuously flexed spine or cusped hock stands out. These strongly articulated forms have a natural graphic magnetism, like the curve of a bay that enthrals the drawing hand. In charcoal drawings, both from life and from the bloodline printouts, and the more linear of Buxton’s paintings, such as Lillibet Away or After Zobeyni 1844, there’s a feeling that maybe these shapes should be allowed to speak for themselves. What more (as you imagine artists often wondering in the life class) do you need to add?

But there’s also a transformation happening in the contours and surfaces of Buxton’s horse paintings that seems analogous to the way in which the landscape around her home on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall enters her art. It’s a question not so much of adding as of assimilating. In later versions of Zobeyni or in the haunting, nocturnal Grey Horse, the anatomical forms have almost dissolved, yet at the same time they feel pervasive. It makes sense when Buxton talks of wanting to ‘lose the image’ or about the intuition that something is ‘passing through’ the painting. The vigorously worked paint surfaces resemble those of her landscapes and function in a similar way: translated into aggregative, all-over paint-strokes, something impalpable – an atmosphere, a movement – acquires a viscous, many-hued materiality, which immediately works to fragment the attention, rather than crystallise it into solid, graspable ideas. The horse itself becomes a kind of horizon, a rhythmic cipher holding the work together, like a meniscus delicately registering both balance and movement.

The title Drawn from the Ancestral applies as much, of course, to landscape as to bloodlines. Both relate to Buxton’s painting through the notion of the palimpsest, the successive layers of inscriptions, or deposits, each one part-augmenting, part-obscuring what went before. This consciousness of the past can weigh heavily in British landscape painting. We can’t forget the common lands greedily enclosed to make pastures and paddocks, the man-traps in the woods. The landscape art of Buxton’s native Australia, whose influence she acknowledges, doesn’t come laden with this semi-feudal baggage of ancestry, and it may be that her horses breathe all the more freely in its absence. If her images of the nineteenth-century celebrity stallion Zobeyni seem possessed, it is by something other than the gaze of a proud owner.

Though the landscape and lanes of Cornwall aren’t, as they would once have been, half-populated by horses, it doesn’t take long to realise that horses get as good a run through art history as landscape or still life, from the wild horses in Chauvet cave, whose kidskin muzzles are some of the earliest known subjects in painting, to Velázquez, Degas or Picasso. It turns out, too, that even the Viennese townie Sigmund Freud couldn’t get horses out of his head: searching for an analogy to describe the relationship between the id and the ego, he imagined a horse and its rider. In other words, such images reach as deep as you can go into the life of the mind.

Michael Bird, September 2011