The suite of three time-based paintings in “l’Opera del Equus,” is based on the play Equus, written by Peter Shaffer in 1973. These three paintings are my interpretation of the play that I have summarized visually in three time-based paintings or “Acts.” I was initially asked to do twenty-one very short video sequences to be used in the University of Southern Maine’s production of Equus. In beginning work on these pieces and after many reads of the play I knew that eventually I wanted to use what I had shot to make a series of time-based paintings about the play. I see the play as an exploration of multiple themes from dysfunctional personal and family structures to conflicts about love, passion religion and gender. Below is an excerpt from the Internet Movie Database that gives a short synopsis and a brief interesting background into the Peter Shaffer’s inspiration for the play.

Equus, Synopsis (From IMDB Written by Seren Leono (verax@mindspring.com)

A psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, investigates the savage blinding of six horses with a metal spike in a stable in Hampshire, England. The atrocity was committed by an unassuming seventeen-year-old stable boy named Alan Strang, the only son of an opinionated but inwardly-timid father and a genteel, religious mother. As Dysart exposes the truths behind the boy's demons, he finds himself face-to-face with his own.

Peter Shaffer was inspired to write Equus by the chance remark of a friend at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The friend recounted to Shaffer a news story about a British youth who blinded twenty-six horses in a stable, seemingly without cause. Shaffer never confirmed the event or discovered more of the details, but the story fascinated him, provoking him ‘‘to interpret it in some entirely personal way.’’ His dramatic goal, he wrote in a note to the play, was ‘‘to create a mental world in which the deed could be made comprehensible.’’