Animals & Art

Georgianna Conger’s Passions

by Pam Gleason

From the time she was very young, Georgianna Conger has been driven by two passions: animals and art. She grew up in Aiken, South Carolina, in her family’s home bordering the Hitchcock Woods, a vast forest of longleaf pines traversed by trails for walking, riding and foxhunting. There she developed her eye for painting, and cultivated an intimate understanding of the many animals around her, especially the dogs that her family kept and raised, and the horses in her mother’s stable. This understanding translates into an ability to capture an animal’s essence in her paintings, making her a natural as an animal portrait artist.

Today, she has a career creating portraits on commission, as well as teaching art to private students of all ages. She still lives on the edge of the Hitchcock Woods in a home next to the one where she grew up and where her mother still lives. Her studio is in a converted tack room in her mother’s backyard stable, where she can look out the window at her two horses.

“I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do this,” she says, seated at a table where she is working on a dog portrait. Her warmblood Fergus, a 20-year-old semi-retired hunter, grazes in his paddock on the other side of the window. The studio’s walls are lined with horse and art books. One of her students, a neighbor and a friend, has just wrapped up a successful session painting a landscape. “Nothing makes me happier than painting someone’s dog or horse and then giving the painting to them and having them say, oh my gosh, you’ve got it. That’s him.”

Georgianna, known to her friends as Girl, was born in Portland, Oregon, but came to Aiken when she was 6 months old. Her father, Ford Conger, was in the lumber business, and her mother Courtney Conger is a lifelong horsewoman with a background in art and journalism. The two met in Augusta, where

Courtney was working as a reporter, and after they married they moved to New York and then to the Northwest for Ford’s job. But Oregon was cold and wet and Courtney was not happy: she needed to be where she could ride, and so they moved back to Aiken with Girl and her two older brothers. There they purchased a historic house that had been owned by Louise and Thomas Hitchcock, founders of Aiken’s Winter Colony. The house, which had been a guest house for the Hitchcocks’ winter visitors, had a 28-stall stable where Courtney took boarders and ran a business buying, breeding, training and selling horses until Girl was 13 years old. Girl and her brothers were very much a part of this enterprise, schooling and showing the sales horses as well as learning every aspect of horse care. It was a perfect place to do it, just a short hack from the Hitchcock Woods, and it was an idyllic childhood.

“I did Pony Club, I showed and foxhunted and evented,” says Girl. “We’d be out in the woods for three and four hours at a time on our ponies, all with no adult supervision. We had chickens and goats and horses and never less than six dogs. It was just magical.”

Their home had separate accommodations where various young horsewomen came to spend a few months every winter. There were students from Bennett College in New York, which had a renowned riding program, and horse trainers such as Carol Altman Fallon, who won the Maclay championship in 1962 and was a superb coach and mentor. For Girl, the most important boarder was Sandra Etherington Tucker, an artist and horsewoman from New Jersey who became a close family friend.

“I must have been 4 or 5 years old, and I was just mesmerized by her. She was working in oils and pastels, and I would sit and watch her,” says Girl. A few years later, Girl started taking art lessons with Anne Lattimore, a respected Aiken artist. Growing up, whenever she wasn’t riding, Girl was drawing and painting. It is no surprise that her subjects were usually the animals around her.

Girl went to Sweet Briar College in Virginia where she studied art, rode on the riding team, and was the head of the riding council. After graduation she moved back to Aiken, where she did animal portraits, sporting art and decorative painting before getting married and having her daughter Caroline. She continued to ride and show – by this time her mother had embarked on her successful real estate career, but there were always family horses available, many of them homebreds. Girl’s father, Ford, was the chairman of the Aiken Steeplechase, and Girl worked with him to organize and promote the event. After his death in the early 1990s, she served on the steeplechase board of directors for 27 years. She has created the covers for the Aiken Spring Classic Horse show annual prize list for 20 years.

Well-known in the horse community, Girl often got commissions for horse and dog paintings, and her career grew organically. She says she is an oil painter by trade, but today works mostly in acrylics, which she appreciates for their versatility and ease of use, and she also loves pencil drawing. She started teaching and mentoring children early on, and added art classes for adult students a few years ago.

Girl is known in Aiken for more than just her art, however. She is also one of the most dedicated volunteers for Friends of the Animal Shelter Aiken (FOTAS), the animal welfare organization that works with the Aiken County Animal Shelter.

“My mom used to breed dogs as a hobby,” says Girl. “So we had a kennel set up for that already, but we had stopped breeding once we realized how bad the situation was with dogs in the shelter here. When one of the founders of FOTAS asked us to foster a mother dog with puppies, we said yes.”

In the beginning, Girl thought that fostering puppies would be a good experience for her daughter Caroline, a preteen at the time, so that she could care for newborn puppies and help to raise a litter. But it became more than that.

After the first litter of puppies was adopted, there was another litter, and then another. With a seemingly never-ending supply, Girl’s kennel is rarely empty for long. In the 12 years that she has been fostering, she estimates that she has taken in about 500 mothers and puppies. Some litters are pure joy while others are devastating heartbreak: mothers might arrive starved or sick, with puppies that are weak and vulnerable to disease. There have been whole litters that have died of Parvo one by one, and litters that have only survived with extensive nursing care. But for the puppies that go on to be adopted into loving homes, it is worth it.

“You’re doing a yeoman’s job,” says Girl, noting that other people do more than she does – fostering more than one litter at a time, for instance – and that she sometimes worries that she is not doing enough. “But then I realize whether you are saving one puppy or ten puppies, at least you are doing something. We do love them. We used to cry and be so sad when we had to say goodbye, but it has gotten easier. We had a litter leave last week, and the runt was so sweet, and I was sorry to see her go. But I just gave her extra kisses and said a little prayer for her to get the best home. That’s all you can do.”

With her daughter Caroline pursuing a PhD at Virginia Tech in Environmental Science, Girl feels that she is entering a new chapter in her life, one in which she will have more time and mental energy to devote to painting. She plans to continue to work on portrait commissions, study with other artists and do more teaching. Although she is limited in the number of students she can host in her own small studio, she hopes to be able to teach at a larger facility in Aiken in the coming year.

“I’ve learned to love teaching,” she says. “And I have learned a lot from it. I am so proud of my students and what they do. I’m pleasantly and proudly surprised by how rewarding it is.”

As for her own art, she is constantly striving to be better, not just in technical aspects, but in the emotional connection that she creates. “I don’t want to sound contrived, but I really do try to capture their little souls,” she says. Many of the painting commissions she gets are of dogs or horses that have recently died, and she works from pictures sent to her. “I’m incredibly honored by that,” she says. “I’m honored to be entrusted with those memories, and so grateful to be able to spend that time with them.”

For more information: congersportingart.com. Girl is available for commissions.