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The Track: 1977–1996
On February 17, 1977, Tom Chapman rode his first race as a licensed jockey. He was young, lean, and fearless in the way that only someone who has never been seriously thrown can be. What followed was nearly two decades on the thoroughbred circuit — tracks up and down California and beyond, thousands of races, and an education in horses that no classroom could replicate.
Being a jockey means learning horses from the inside out. You feel the power shift beneath you as a horse finds its stride. You read the tension in a neck, the rhythm of breathing, the subtle lean that tells you whether a horse is running with heart or just going through the motions. Tom absorbed all of it — not as an observer, but as a participant.
Along the way, Tom rode alongside some of the greats, including the incomparable Bill Shoemaker — widely considered the finest jockey who ever lived. Racing at that level, in that company, sharpens your eye for what excellence looks like: the precise calibration of effort and instinct, the difference between a good horse and a truly great one.
By 1994, Tom was still competing. The photo of him at the Bay Meadows scale — saddle in hand, silks on, the easy grin of a man comfortable in his world — captures a jockey in full stride. But something else was already stirring.
The Overlap: When Two Worlds Collided
There is one photograph that tells the whole story of Tom Chapman's transition — and it happened in the most unlikely place: the jockeys' room at Bay Meadows racetrack. There he is, still in his racing silks, bent over a canvas, painting Canada geese with total concentration. The easel is wedged between the lockers. The palette is propped on whatever surface was available.
He had started taking art lessons — initially just to understand color mixing and values — but quickly discovered that painting wasn't a hobby. It was a calling. The same focus that made him a competitive jockey was pulling him toward the canvas. Between races. Before the card. In any spare moment the track would give him.
For a period of time, both worlds existed simultaneously. On one side: the silks, the weight room, the pre-race rituals, the roar of the crowd. On the other: brushes, oils, canvas, and the quiet concentration of a man learning to see differently. The jockeys' room painting is not a curiosity — it is the hinge of a life.
The Studio: Life After the Track
In 1996, Tom Chapman hung up his silks for the last time. Nearly twenty years in the saddle — and now, a different kind of riding: the long, patient discipline of the working artist.
The transition could have been jarring. Instead, it felt like an extension of everything he already knew. The anatomical knowledge he had built on the track — the musculature of a horse in full gallop, the way weight distributes through a turn, the particular alertness in the eyes of a thoroughbred before a race — became the foundation of his art. Where other painters study horses from photographs, Tom knew them from the inside.
His subjects expanded with his confidence. Horses, yes — always horses — but also dogs, cats, birds, wildlife. He took his easel to the California coast and painted landscapes en plein air, the kind of work that demands you respond to light in real time, with no second chances. He painted chickens. He painted whatever caught his eye and refused to let go.
Realism became his natural language — an approach that honors the subject by rendering it with precision and care. But Tom has also worked in impressionism, and you can see that influence in the way he handles light: not just representing it, but letting it carry emotional weight. His dramatic use of color and shadow is not decorative. It is the difference between a painting of a horse and a painting that makes you feel like you are standing at the rail.
By 2013, Tom was exhibiting regularly, standing in front of gallery walls hung with large-format equestrian paintings — the same animals he once rode, now rendered in oil with the authority of someone who earned his subject matter. The career had fully turned. The jockey had become the artist. Or perhaps more accurately: the jockey had always been the artist, waiting for the right moment to pick up the brush.
What the Track Taught the Painter
Tom often says that his racing background is the most important thing he brings to his art — not just for the anatomical knowledge, but for the way it trained him to pay attention. In racing, inattention costs you. You learn to read situations quickly, to commit fully, and to trust your instincts under pressure.
Those same qualities live in his paintings. There is nothing tentative about Tom's work. The brushstrokes are decisive. The compositions are bold. And when he paints a horse, you sense that the artist is not working from reference alone — he is working from memory, from feeling, from twenty years of knowing what it means to sit on the back of something that powerful and try to keep up.
The paddock photograph says it best. A horse, still, aware, carrying itself with the unconscious dignity that horses have. Tom has stood at hundreds of paddocks — first as a jockey, studying his mount before a race; now as a painter, studying his subject before the canvas. The eye is the same. Only the tool has changed.
"To ride a thoroughbred is to borrow its strength for a fleeting moment. To paint one is to give that moment back-eternal, untamed, and alive."
— Tom Chapman