Why The Cowgirl Project?

My Great Grandmother in her wooly chaps spent her whole life on the Alberta Prairies

For me, it started when I moved to my ex-husband’s family farm in east central Alberta almost ten years ago. I remember sitting on my horse out in the field and feeling this strange mix of certainty and doubt. I loved the life. I was working it. Living it. Raising kids in it. But I still hesitated to call myself a cowgirl. It felt like a title reserved for someone tougher, more skilled, more “official.”

So instead of arguing with myself about it, I started painting and discovering what “Cowgirl” really means.

“It’s in My Blood” 18×36” oil on stretched canvas. Not for sale.

I painted old family photos. I painted women from generations before me. I painted my friends working alongside their husbands with kids in tow. Somewhere in that process, I realized the women I knew—the women I came from were not being portrayed appropriately in mainstream media, and I could change that. I saw women on my social media, I met women at art shows, and they were women who were just doing the work. Loving their people. Enduring hard seasons. Showing up again the next day.

The Cowgirl Project is my public call to those women.

IIt’s an ongoing series of paintings based on real stories and real photographs—past and present—of women with horses. It’s about reclaiming “cowgirl” as a mindset, not a skill set. Capable. Passionate. Determined. Community-minded.

It’s about honoring the women history skipped over.
It’s about translating lived experience into something visible and lasting.
And most of all, it’s about building community through art—so that when a woman sees one of these paintings, she doesn’t just see a horse and a hat.

As long as women are out there doing the work, I’ll keep painting them.