Horsewoman. Artist. Perpetual Student of the Horse.
I have spent most of my life trying to understand horses.
Somewhere along the way, I realized they were teaching me just as much about creativity, curiosity, trust, and being human.
I come by the horse-crazy honestly. My grandfather was a rodeo cowboy. He died when I was a baby, so I never had the chance to know him, but I grew up hearing stories about his life with horses. He rodeoed around the country, broke horses for the U.S. Cavalry, and, according to family lore, even rode in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at Madison Square Garden.
Apparently, horses were going to find me one way or another.
A Life Built Around Horses
I began riding English, studying the foundations of dressage, hunter under saddle, and cross country before eventually finding my way into Western performance horses.
That is where horses became more than something I loved. They became my profession.
After college, where I earned a degree in fine arts, I worked for trainers in the horsemanship and reining industries. I started colts, worked with difficult and troubled horses, developed reining horses, traveled, taught, and spent countless hours learning how horses think and how people communicate with them.
Over the years, my education has taken me in a lot of directions.
I have studied traditional horsemanship, performance training, liberty work, positive reinforcement, and ideas borrowed from horsemen whose methods sometimes look very different from one another.
I am still learning.
In fact, the longer I work with horses, the less interested I become in declaring that there is one correct way to train them.
There are principles I believe deeply in. Timing matters. Clarity matters. Fairness matters. Feel matters. So does curiosity.
But the horse standing in front of you always gets a vote.
Then Came the Mustangs
Of all the horses who have shaped my horsemanship, the American Mustang may have taught me the most.
A wild horse does not automatically accept our assumptions about how this relationship is supposed to work. Their trust is not something we are entitled to. We have to earn it.
Little by little.
That changed me.
I began competing in Extreme Mustang Makeover events in 2011. In 2012, I finished fourth in the finals. The following year, I competed in the inaugural Mustang Million, finishing fifth and earning $50,700 as the highest-placing woman in the competition.
Since then, mustangs have continued to open doors I never expected.
They have taken me into competitions, demonstrations, clinics, and adventures across the country. I have competed at Road to the Horse, continued developing horses for ranch and stock horse competition, and worked with horses ranging from untouched mustangs and young colts to seasoned riding horses whose people simply wanted a better relationship with them.
But the ribbons and competitions are only a small part of why these horses matter so much to me.
Mustangs taught me to pay attention.
They taught me that obedience and understanding are not necessarily the same thing.
They taught me that trust is built like an emotional bank account, one deposit at a time.
And they taught me that sometimes the most important thing happening in a training session is almost invisible.
A breath.
A softer eye.
A moment of stillness.
A horse choosing curiosity instead of fear.
That is the horsemanship I am most interested in now.
There Is No Recipe
After years of working professionally with horses, I came to a conclusion that is both wonderfully freeing and terribly inconvenient:
I cannot give you a neat little system for horsemanship.
Horses are too individual for that.
People are too individual for that.
What I can offer is a collection of tools, principles, experiences, and ways of thinking that help you become better at understanding the horse in front of you.
My goal as a teacher is not to make people dependent on a method.
I want to help them develop judgment.
I want them to notice more.
To become curious when something is not working.
To understand pressure and release, reward, timing, body language, emotion, movement, and stillness.
And eventually, to develop something much harder to put into words.
Feel.
The Artist Was Here All Along
Before I was a professional horse trainer, I was an artist.
For a long time those felt like two separate parts of my life.
They do not anymore.
I earned my degree in fine arts, and creativity has always found its way into whatever I am doing. I draw. I paint. I design. I make things. Recently, I have found myself returning more seriously to fine art, particularly Western and wildlife work inspired by the animals, landscapes, and strange beautiful moments that surround my life with horses.
The more I paint and the more I work with horses, the more alike those processes begin to feel.
Both require observation.
Both require technical skill, but become lifeless when technique is all you have.
Both require knowing when to act and when to leave something alone.
Both require curiosity.
Both occasionally require admitting that whatever brilliant plan you started with is absolutely not working.
And every once in a while, something happens that you could not quite manufacture.
The horse softens.
The painting comes alive.
Something shifts.
That is the space I have started calling Alchemy in the Reins.
It is the place where craft meets intuition, where knowledge meets mystery, and where the raw materials we begin with become something we could not entirely predict.
This Is Where All of It Meets
This website is home to both sides of my work.
Here you will find horsemanship clinics, educational resources, thoughts from the training pen, and eventually online courses for people who want to explore horses a little more deeply.
You will also find my original paintings, prints, sketches, experiments, and whatever else wanders out of the studio.
And in the Field Notes, you will find the things I am thinking about along the way.
Horses. Art. Mustangs. Training. Creativity. Trust. Stillness. Failure. Curiosity. Faith. Probably a few questionable decisions.
I am still a student of all of it.
And I suspect I always will be.
Maybe that is the point.
