Pedigree and Palette Come Alike to Stuebs

What's in a name? Well, potentially quite a lot, if a single letter can weigh as much as it does in that of Kris Stuebs. The one that starts her surname enabled her to call her professional agency Kris S. Bloodstock, in playful homage to her equine namesake. Few who know her in that guise, however, will ever have reflected that you only have to switch one letter in her surname to come up with the ultimate paragon for her second metier: Stubbs.

For Stuebs has uniquely entwined two very different paths since discovering an unlikely vocation for Thoroughbreds in Wisconsin–as unlikely in terms of lineage, coming as she does from a family of preachers, as location. One, for the past 30 years, has enabled her to steer clients like Peter Vegso and Sheikh Abdullah Almaddah toward productive purchases or matings: one of her earliest recommendations to Vegso resulted in dual Grade I winner Splendid Blended (Unbridled's Song), for instance; while Sheikh Abdullah's $260,000 acquisition of Rote (Tiznow) at the Keeneland November Sale in 2011 brought into his program a mare capable of producing two seven-figure foals.

But it is in another role, somewhat less well known in the bloodstock community, that Stuebs will be making her next impact on the Lexington scene. She is set to be an Artist of the Month for October in the downtown Wills Gallery, exhibiting works executed with a verve encouraged by no less a figure than Andre Pater–whose stature, as an inspiration to Stuebs and others, can incidentally be judged right now at his American Journey retrospective at the Headley-Whitney Museum of Art through Nov. 17.

There is a common margin between her two callings–and a common mystery. Because an agent's appraisal is not just of the mechanical construction of a horse, but also of the character that will deploy that physique to meet the challenges of racing. In the same way, the technical skill that can reproduce the external aspect of a horse on canvas is only half of what makes a painting work. You don't just draw; you draw out. You have to express whatever it is, combined with anatomy, that sets a horse apart.

Stuebs duly has an aversion to what she calls the “trophy art” of conformation portraits, typically commissioned to hang above an owner's fireplace as a status symbol.

“I've done my share of those,” she admits. “But I don't want to paint something just to paint it. That takes too long! Instead of doing the standard thing, I want it to be all about the horse in the situation–not just standing there, but more of a neoclassical thing, even like the Napoleonic image of the eyes bulging, the neck arched. Take a painting I did of Medaglia d'Oro [with both his forelegs raised]. I found this great photograph of him at a stallion show, and he was just feeling cheeky that day. I had to remove him from the commercial situation in the photo, but that was just what I'd seen this big, strong horse doing a number of times, and that was just him.”

This is just a specific variation, of course, of the generic challenge to any artist: to combine the craft of replication with an eye for those traits, in bearing or demeanour, that exposes the deeper nature of your subject.

“You do first of all need the technical skills to put something three-dimensional into two,” Stuebs acknowledges. “It's like when I used to play softball, our coach first wanted us to throw 100% accurately, to hit really well, to know every single situation. And then you were a state championship ball club, because you were putting it all together. But you see a lot of people who can draw. To get beyond that, I think it comes down to recognising beauty.

“Like for this recent piece I did, of a horse in the turn, I'd seen an image of this whole blanket of horses–but I just wanted to pull out the one, because of the light, and the form. And the colour. One time I asked Andre [Pater] which single colour in the palette he'd choose, if he had to use one every time, and we both ended up on the same one. You wouldn't find it in a Crayola pack, but you'd see it in the bottom of the clouds in a sunset sky. These are the colours that make things beautiful, that we stand in awe of; and it's so much fun, the places you can use them.”

Actually it was a moment of light and colour, captured by a National Geographic photographer, that first brought Stuebs to the Bluegrass. “You know how when the mist is really heavy, but not fog?” she says. “And it's just about the height of the fences, and the sun comes up, and you get the pink and the purple and the blue? And I remember saying: 'I'm going to live there.' And that was Paris, Kentucky.”

Stuebs jokes that her eye has now become so attuned to aesthetics that “painting has absolutely ruined me at a horse sale,” because no specimen is ever faultless.

“I'll go and look at these horses, and take my photographs, and stand back and look at them again,” she says. “And you think well, yes, this is a really nice horse. But I'd make the hip this much longer, and the pastern a bit more like this, and so on. Maybe it's for good, I've had some very good turns, but I think it probably makes me irritating to some clients! They say, 'What's wrong with this horse?' And I say, 'Well, nothing, but it's not beautiful.”

Rote herself was not immaculate, conformationally, but she was beautiful. She was a big mare, too, so Stuebs knew what kind of complement she needed.

“She needed tidy, she needed quick, she needed all these things you wanted the foal to be,” she recalls. “And her first Tapit foal [Grade II-placed Royal Obsession] really pulled everything together. But there's nothing worse than when you get this 86-billion-to-one genetic code, and then you go back and do the same mating, and get an even better physical–and he can't run a jump!”

The immensity of genetic variations means that Stuebs mistrusts formulaic programs in her matings advice. In fact, her approach is very much akin to mixing colours on the palette: she looks for patterns and tones across a pedigree, and tries to see what needs reinforcing; what needs diluting.

“It's interesting, I've never used that analogy but it's dead on,” she says. “It is just like you mix these colours: some warmer, some cooler; some darker, some lighter. There are so many algorithms out there, and some of them can be useful to an extent. However, when I look at a pedigree I read it like a book.”

She remembers first browsing pedigrees when she came to Kentucky, as a horse-crazy veterinary student at the local university, and picked up a job at Brookdale. At that stage, she was “happy as a clam” just to groom these beautiful animals. When she had renounced piano lessons as a kid, her father retorted that she'd have to do lessons in something. So she announced that she would take up riding. She soon got through her savings, but her instructor had recognized a talent and let her carry on in exchange for mucking out. And when Fred Seitz gave her work at the Kinghaven dispersal, and she walked a weanling who would someday become the granddam of Sidney's Candy, she began to ask herself what it was that set some of these lovely creatures above the rest.

“That's what cemented my interest in pedigrees, right there,” she recalls. “Going through page after page, it seemed so crazy. And like when I was given a Rubik's Cube in fourth grade, I wouldn't set it down until I had this thing fixed. How does all this all fit together? How the heck could Colonel Bradley and Tesio do this without a computer? Why does this work: Blushing Groom, say, and Nijinsky? And it all started to fall into place, like a puzzle does. These renewable, replaceable patterns. And as they started to emerge, you could put it all together–with the physical, the style, the running ability–and read it like a book. There isn't a computer program that can do that.”

She gives an example of how one such program gave a famous runner (and now sire) a rock-bottom rating when he won his first stake, and a top-class rating after he won a first Grade I soon afterward. “He'd created the nick by himself!” she says with a laugh.

Because, in the end, that kind of thing is the equivalent of painting by numbers. The task is too subtle for that: it needs touch, instinct, artistry. As Stuebs says herself: “There's so much that can go wrong. People that hang their hat on just one thing? Good luck!”

{} The artist reception and opening of Stuebs's exhibition, shared with Celeste Susany, takes place 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Oct. 8 at the Wills Gallery, 190 Jefferson Street, Lexington.