He happened upon me, a stallion crested over the horizon.  Windswept and shining, he flooded the hillside.  “When the wind was in the north, you could hear them; horses, and the breath of the horses, and the horses hooves that were shod in rawhide, and the rattle of the lances, and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent.  And the young boys naked on wild horses, jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them, and the dogs trotting with their tongues allol and foot slaves following half naked and sorely burdened, and above all, the low chant of their travelling song which the riders sang as they rode. Nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft corral across that mineral waste to darkness, barren, lost to all history and all rememberance like a grail, the sum of their secular and transitory violent lives.” [Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses] 

Hair, skin, muscle, bone; the pathology of touch. Painting is his rhythm hymn, grooming, brushing, washing, sweeping, living for another.  A tale of yin, the fantasy of the beast, a romance of his masters.  Tuning your body to the weather, following the compass of body temperature, and the grain of fur.  For reverence of muscle, and the hot blood that runs underneath skin, he cast an idol.