As a young American art student in Holland, I asked myself how would I conceive of an equestrian monument. My professor had said all good sculpture is blind. This led me to the meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninas. He said Man seeks harmony and by studying nature he finds himself and in finding himself, he finds the deity.  I finally came to the conclusion that to create harmony between the human figure and the horse, I had to create a unity of the horizontal component (the horse), and the vertical component (the rider).