Jaime Corum once shipped the famed racehorse Zenyatta across the country in a horse trailer—a life-size painting of Zenyatta, that is.
“I’m her fangirl,” said Corum, an Eastern Kentucky-based artist widely known for her equine paintings, who affectionately calls the 2010 North American Horse of the Year “Zenny Z.” Zenyatta’s her favorite race mare.
“I’ve met her a few times, and she’s truly one that gives me goosebumps,” Corum said. “[When] she was just retired, I got to go out to Lane’s End Farm [in Versailles] and really be with her and get all of her proportions for the life-size canvas. It was like painting your favorite rock star.”
Zenyatta is one of many famous racehorses Corum has spent time with, getting backstage access not available to the general public so she can paint her commissioned equine portraits.
Much of the painting—primarily oil on canvas—happens in Corum’s family’s holler near Pineville, almost in the shadow of Pine Mountain. It’s where Corum can often be found ambling through the forest behind her home, riding a four-wheeler, watching otters swim in the pond below her house, shooting a rattlesnake that’s threatening one of her three dogs, or simply soaking in the trees.
“The rattlesnake was threatening my furry children, so that got my Uma Thurman Kill Bill going on. I have two different sides,” she laughed.
Her shot was accurate, and her art is just as successful, her talent cultivated through years of practice and thousands of paintings.
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Corum began drawing when was young. Growing up in Southeastern Kentucky, she did not get to see and ride many horses in person, but the love was innate. She called them her “special muses.”
“I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t enamored by horses,” she said. “I was always drawn to horses and always wanted one. I’d always draw them and watch horse movies and collect horse figurines.”
While she didn’t live in horse country, a neighbor owned a Tennessee Walking Horse that Corum sometimes got to ride. At 11, her family moved to Louisville, where her aunt was a professional dressage trainer, and Corum’s life changed.
“I’m so glad I got to grow up as a tomboy country girl, playing in the mud, chasing frogs and stuff—I wouldn’t trade that for anything—but I rarely really got to ride,” she said. “When we moved to Louisville, my aunt Marjorie had ridden at Spring Run Farm out in Prospect—it’s still there and active—and that was probably the thing that formed me most as a human because I spent so much time out there as a young person. I was like, ‘OK, I’ll move to Louisville if I get to ride.’ ”
Photographer: Ron Perrin. All r
Corum joined Pony Club and continued drawing horses, which evolved to painting horses. She sometimes painted horses or dogs for her friends, which led to more—and bigger—customers. At that time, she was fully ensconced in the eventing and dressage world. Thoroughbred racing wasn’t yet on her radar.
Corum attended Louisville’s Bellarmine University, received an MFA from the University of Kentucky, and ultimately returned to Bellarmine to teach part time, allowing time for her blossoming painting career.
“Suddenly, I was being asked to paint people’s horses more outside of my immediate circles, and I was having shows,” Corum said. “Leonard Lusky, who created secretariat.com, saw my work and commissioned me to do a Secretariat and Barbaro pair, and that was my first entrée into Thoroughbred racing … This was about 2004. That grew into me getting audiences with Zenyatta, [American] Pharoah and others.”
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Fast forward to 2022, when Corum was commissioned to create a painting for Woodford Reserve’s Kentucky Derby collector’s edition bottle, which the distillery releases each year. She was asked again the following year to paint Secretariat. for Woodford Reserve to mark the 50th anniversary of Big Red’s 1973 Triple Crown win.
“I love bourbon culture, so it was a really cool honor that they wanted me to do it,” she said. “I loved it, and it was a huge benefit to my business. I even heard that a bottle made it to the Vatican. You just never know where it’s going to wind up.”
That project took her name recognition to the next level. Corum’s paintings and prints ship worldwide, and she’s painted commissions for clients in far-flung locations.
“It’s just funny what can happen if you just keep doggedly following the path,” she reflected. “I think I was just naive enough not to give up. And I had a very supportive family who, in the lean years, made sure I wasn’t starving.”
But it’s more than Corum’s sheer talent as a painter that sets her apart. It’s clear that she just “gets” horses.
“A lot of times, people try to overpower the horse, but the horse understands you,” she said. “They can feel your energy. You really have to work with them and speak their language.”
She’s fascinated with the psychology of horses and why people, especially women, are drawn to them.
“You can talk to anyone who has that horse connection and have instant common ground,” Corum said. “I love, of course, their beauty, and as a woman, I always wonder if they are a pathway to strength and a power that we don’t have. We don’t want to overpower them—we become friends with that power, and they willingly give us that strength. There’s often a relationship between horses and women that’s different than [that of horses and] men.”
She believes learning to work successfully with horses and other animals can translate to human psychology and that it has “built a lot of character in me.”
Meeting famous racehorses continues to cultivate her reverence and awe.
“Horses have millions of personalities, just like people,” Corum said. “And the great ones have a different quality; they have a powerful essence that you can feel. Like Zenyatta … ahh … the way that she held herself—she held her neck so high, and she was already so tall. She was over 17 hands tall [around 70 inches], and she held her head just so, and she’d just look at you. But she was always very sweet, which you don’t always get with the race mares.”
She described 2015 Triple Crown and Breeders’ Cup Classic winner American Pharoah as “actually super chill, but also you got the sense that he knew his worth.”
When Corum met 2007 and 2008 Horse of the Year Curlin, she said, “He was one that I could look at all day, a truly gorgeous creature.
“You realize it’s not a common thing for your average person to come into these beautiful Thoroughbred farms and have an audience with these horses,” she said. “I feel very, very blessed. I will never lose how special that is. I feel like I have the best job in the world.”
Meeting racehorses and trying to paint them isn’t like asking a human subject to “sit” for a portrait. Corum meets the horses, often takes their measurements, and takes videos and photographs, but otherwise, she draws on her many years of experience with horses to be successful.
“That allowed me to distinguish individual features very clearly in each one,” she said. “I grew up in the right state. I had just the right little bubble environments to grow up and do this in. And then by the time I was out of graduate school, I felt confident having the educational credentials behind me. I could confidently walk the walk.”
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Corum’s work now speaks for itself. Recent projects locally include three massive, commissioned murals in Paris, Kentucky. They include depictions of 1989 Horse of the Year Sunday Silence, Curlin and Secretariat. These murals make beautiful additions to the town as it celebrates its horse racing heritage. The initial painting of Secretariat was the first element toward the creation of Secretariat Park and has contributed to the revitalization of the downtown led by Paris native Chris Poynter, his family and his partners.
“I feel like Paris is my second home,” Corum said. “It’s gotten so cool there with a great downtown and main street.”
She also painted the winners of the Vox Populi Horse of the Year Award, created by the late Penny Chenery, who bred and owned Secretariat.
This year, Corum looks forward to celebrating the “Year of the Horse” and plans some special shows to honor it. Follow along on her website for information and dates (jaimecorumequineart.com).
“I’m having so much fun with the year of the horse concept,” she said. “I’m adding some gold leaf and mixed media and just doing what I want in this series.”
Her work often is marked by special touches.
“I love to explore more surrealist and maybe symbolist themes in my art where are some non-literal things happen with the horse—for example, the horse will be standing in front of or weaving in and out of a tapestry background,” Corum said. “There will be just a little nod to something different. They are not just standing in a landscape.
“I love the elements of the surreal, the romanticism. I’ve always loved those non-literal elements. The way horses make me feel—it really is kind of a spiritual experience. It’s something that deserves more than just a cut-and-dry photo realism treatment. It deserves something a little bit extra.”