Kinki the cheeky colt

Kinki the cheeky colt

written and illustrated by Margrate Greig

New South Wales artist Margaret Greig has an impressive CV. Her work has been published on cards and calendars, exhibited around Australia and overseas, and this year she wrote and illustrated her first children’s book. Kinki the Cheeky Colt combines two of her passions: art and horses. The 30 illustrations featured in the book are all painted by mouth—when Margaret was 13 years old, she contracted polio, which left her a quadriplegic. She is excited about her latest venture, saying the inspiration for her children’s book sprang from for the miniature horses she breeds on her Moruya (NSW) property. ‘I’ve been passionate about horses since I was a child and used to ride on my parents’ farm on the NSW South Coast. Then a friend gave me a miniature black stallion as a birthday present—I’ve had him since he was four-and-a-half months old and he turned 26 this month,’ Margaret says. ‘Now I have six of them. They are beaut little things—they’re a good size for a wheelchair, just right for me to interact with, and they’ve got a good temperament. They can be quite cheeky at times, just like “Kinki” in my book, who goes about the farm getting up to all sorts of mischief.’ Margaret discovered she could use her mouth to draw when she was admitted to Wollongong Hospital after contracting the debilitating disease. ‘I needed to write home to my family, but it was hard to dictate to somebody else when I was young and not quite sure what I wanted to say. So I just started to write with a pen in my mouth; that led to some wild drawings and the painting followed,’ she recalls. ‘At the start, it was a matter of getting control of the brushes and the pen. I’m sure God gave me straight teeth on one side to hold brushes because they fit all right! Some people have trouble with brushes, but they fit comfortably in my mouth.’