Success Arrives on a Fast Track : ‘Slow’ Artist’s Second Career Takes Off Like a Racehorse Out of the Starting Gate

Eleven years ago, Fred Stone was like a lot of middle-aged men. He was a business executive with a good income, but he no longer liked his work. Many years earlier, he had shown promise in art, and he yearned to return to it. At 46, he felt that time was running out.

Stone decided to take the leap. He quit his job. As part of the change, he and his wife, Norma, sold their Woodland Hills home and moved to Agoura.

“I started painting Western art because it was popular at the time,” Stone remembered. “Gallery owners said, ‘Well, this is good, but how much are you going to produce? We don’t want to promote you unless you produce a lot.’ ”

The problem was familiar. Pressure to work quickly had forced Stone to leave a job as an artist at an advertising agency more than 20 years before.

“I’m just too slow and detail-minded,” he explained. “I could never sacrifice what I wanted to do for speed.”

So it seemed that his new career was at a dead end. For lack of a better idea, he took a suggestion by his daughter to paint racehorses. He started “on spec,” painting stakes-caliber horses and offering the works to the owners.

To his surprise, Stone found that he liked the race track and that horses were exciting subjects. The excitement seemed to come through in the work. The paintings sold well, as long as Stone charged no more than $400 or $500.

The second part of the formula for success--getting more money from the work--was solved soon enough. Stone began painting horses, jockeys and races with wide appeal, then making and selling lithograph prints of the originals.

“I had no idea I would do as well as I have,” he said. “Within a year and a half or two years, it went crazy. For the last six years, everything I put out is sold within a week or 10 days.”

What’s more, the editions have grown in size from 450 prints to 950. New issue price for a print is $190, and Stone puts out three or four editions a year, meaning gross income exceeds $600,000 annually. The artist also sells the original paintings--for $20,000 you can buy “The Rivalry,” a head-on depiction of Alysheba’s win over Bet Twice in the 1987 Kentucky Derby--and he licenses his artwork to a manufacturer of collector plates.

Not all the income is Stone’s. Most of the prints are sold through galleries, which take a cut. But Stone does well, and so do collectors of his work.

Virginia House, a gallery owner in Temecula, said she knows of two sales of “8,000 Wins,” a 1981 depiction of jockey Bill Shoemaker, at $8,000. The print of Alysheba’s Derby has doubled in price in less than a year, she said.

“It’s the way he paints horses like they actually are,” House said of Stone’s popularity. “He has one, ‘The Moment After,’ that shows a horse right after a race. The horse’s nostrils are extended, and some people don’t like it. But that’s how a horse looks right after a race. You could walk into a gallery that has John Wayne on the wall and John Henry done by Fred Stone, and you’d know it’s John Henry as quickly as you know it’s John Wayne.”

House said collectors of Stone’s prints often are far from affluent and must make monthly payments for a purchase. The artist declares that “over half are dirt poor. They work at race tracks or they have horses, and they just love them.”

Work Counter to Traditions

A tall, effusive man with a white mustache and a shock of white hair, Stone produces work that runs counter to racing traditions. The archetypal thoroughbred painting is a side view of the horse, either standing in a field or running on the track with hind legs and forelegs extended in a graceful arch. The body likely will appear leaner than a real horse’s, and the head and neck more serpentine.

Stone paints horses realistically. He gave Man O’ War his thick neck and Forego his plow-horse face. Horses caught mid-race will have muscles that are bunched and heavy rather than sleek and graceful. Nijinsky II has lather at the mouth.

And the original paintings are watercolors, not oils.

Twice, Stone said, owners of horses have bought paintings only to return them after discovering that they are not oils. One buyer was Sam Rubin, whose John Henry holds the record for lifetime winnings on the track.

“People think that watercolors have to be a slapdash kind of thing, but the way I put on layer after layer, it takes four or five weeks to do a painting,” Stone said.

Generate Emotion

“If we’re lucky,” added Norma, who runs the business end of the enterprise.

Stone said his aim in painting is to tell a story and generate emotion. With “The Final Thunder” in 1982, he first used a montage technique. Done in autumnal tones, the painting shows a retired Man O’ War standing in a field with his lifetime groom, Will Harbut. The horse is looking off, ears pricked, as if he hears death coming. In the sky behind is a gray, spectral horse race--the Man O’ War of 25 years earlier leading his field to the wire.

“It really struck a chord with people,” the artist said. “Man O’ War was the Babe Ruth of horse racing. We had so many orders, the post office brought them in sacks in a truck. In one week, we sent back $38,000 in checks. Today, the print sells for $4,000 to $5,000.”

Stone’s mail shows just how emotionally attached people become to racehorses. One recent letter scolds him for painting the unbeaten filly Ruffian’s match race in 1975 against the Derby-winning colt Foolish Pleasure. Ruffian broke down in the race and was destroyed. The fan said that depicting the race was in extremely poor taste.

A woman in Michigan thanked Stone “for your God-given talent, which has given me so much pleasure and added so much to our home.”

‘Powerful Moments’

One race day at Santa Anita, Stone said, he walked beside John Henry through the tunnel that leads from the paddock to the track.

“We came out into the sunlight and 80,000 people began cheering, and it was one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever felt.”

Chances are the crowd was more like 50,000 or 60,000, but Stone admits that he gets swept away by emotion.

“It’s the most fascinating world of people there is, from the wretches of society to the kings and queens,” he said. “You have that great crowd of people chanting, ‘John, John, you can do it, John,’ and all these Damon Runyon types, and the wealthy people up in the Turf Club. It’s fabulous.”

Stone finds, however, that some people look down their noses at the track.

‘He Doesn’t Understand’

“My mentor as an artist, Harold Kramer, says it’s crude, there’s gambling, it’s bad for the horses. He doesn’t understand how I can like it.”

Kramer taught Stone at the Art Center, since moved from Los Angeles to Pasadena. Oddly, Stone’s daughter, Laura, had the opposite reaction to the races. Fascinated since her early teens with thoroughbreds and the science of breeding them, she was working at the track as a trainer’s assistant when she suggested that her father paint horses.

Today, Laura Stone is a U.S. representative for a blood stock agency based in Paris. She advises her father on the buying and breeding of a handful of horses he owns in partnership with his brother, Martin, chairman of the board of California Business magazine. The artist’s 16-year detour into management and sales was with Martin Stone’s former company, Monogram Industries.

The Stones also have a son, Russ, who works as a computer programmer.

The artist’s next painting will be of Winning Colors, the filly that captured this year’s Kentucky Derby. As usual, Stone will work from photographs.

“If you’ve seen a thoroughbred, you know you can’t get them to stand still for five seconds,” he said.

And Stone isn’t about to win any races for working fast.