Jacquie Jones is a painter. She paints horses. We are not talking here of statuesque nags rendered by the likes of George Stubbs with over-pumped muscles and their heads too small. We are talking of life and movement, of flying manes and blazing eyes, and legs to carry their owners through any twist and turn without snapping.

This is art from the heart, the manifestation of a deep-rooted love which grew, improbably, in less-than-rustic south London. There were never many horses in south London, not after the arrival of the motor car, anyway, but there were horse shows and circuses on Clapham Common. And the Common was close to Jacquie's childhood council estate - 'it was my saving grace' she says. She saw enough horses to fall in love and horses and art, in no particular order, became her passions.

She was drawing even then, though with few academic qualifications, she missed out on art school, becoming instead a window dresser in equally horseless Woolwich. But the windows became her paintings and to such effect that, still well down in her teens, she was left to her own devices by the department store which employed her. And yet the horses wouldn't lie down and that neglected passion eventually threw a tantrum. Everything in the window went flying as the inner self - to which Jacquie often refers - said she must leave London. At 18, she did just that.
But it wasn't entirely a leap in the dark. With a spin-off taste for unusual and secondhand clothes, she knew a clothes shop owner who knew horse trainers, including Ian Balding. With just a few riding school rides behind her, she got a job, grooming and riding out at his stables in Berkshire. She also painted horse murals - graffiti, she says - on the stable walls; no-one objected and it helped assuage that side of her soul.

It was the body which next began to object because stable wages were barely liveable. With no chance of a race ride - the hope of many lads but not many girls in the male domain of those days - she returned to shop windows, though as it happened, windows were suddenly things of their time. For this was now the late 1960s in Carnaby Street and The King's Road. Jacquie went freelance, doing windows all around London. It was a time of great energy and movement which would stay with her.

"If you were there," she says, "it's like a bubble that never bursts. That time was the springboard to my creative life. There was this feeling that anything was possible and I have never lost that ideal. Anything is possible if you have enough passion."

But her passion remained divided and soon the horses were pulling hard again. She went back to the country and another yard, working on meagre wages for an autocratic and hard-driving trainer.
One morning, a horse kicked her, horribly mutilating her leg and, alone, she had to ride the two miles back with her own flesh laying over her boot. The lengthy spell in hospital would have finished the dream for most but, repaired, she was back at it, riding out, doing graffiti and somehow strengthened by the experience. There was a spell with a feisty 84-year-old lady trainer at Sandbanks in Dorset, riding out on the beach, thrillingly by the moving sea (the energy thing again)  but the wages were no better.

Eventually, in the 1970s, she reached Newmarket, fronting up to yards, seeking work, doing paintings, scraping by.

There was a minor break when she got to manage a small antiques shop which she was able to use as her gallery. But when the owner sold it, she was back to the horses. That was the pattern in those first two decades, horses and art, oscillating from one to the other according to the urge or the circumstances. But talking to her now, you can see that one has always depended on the other. One is the physical experience, the other the emotive expression.

"The physicality of racing always attracted me. I loved riding and physical work, and the competitiveness And there was the drive of having wanted a horse as a child, and never having had one; there was a painful longing in my heart."

The last trainer she worked for was Henry Cecil. "He was so polite, so charismatic and knowledgeable," she says. "With the quality of the horses and the calibre of the man, he was a joy to work for." It was at Cecil's yard that she came to work with a horse called Age Quod Agis, or Do As You Will. "That wonderful grey epitomised everything I had wanted to paint. He was magical, beautiful and he won good races. By then, I had been meditating for some time, partly because horses used to bolt with me and I realised that they can sense your fear and adrenaline. So I read a lot, went to meditation classes, and then every morning before work I would relax and meditate and surrender my day to God. So God would ride the horse and the horse would feel the empathy and tranquility. I put it to the test many times, pouring out this inner calm and feeling the horse absorb it. This grey's particular sensitivity and my spiritual passion somehow fused. For me, he fulfilled a lifetime of desire."  But the horse had a terrible accident. One morning, on the gallops with another rider, he stumbled and threw the jockey. At the time, there were no barriers on Warren Hill and the horse galloped straight into a soft top sports car, tragically killing the young driver. The horse survived - just - but Jacquie took it as a sign to quit.

"I had been trying to get out of racing to concentrate on painting and the inner voice was now saying it was time. So I worked for six months to get the horse fit enough for stud in America and then I left." And at least by then, she had actually had a couple of race rides. "The funny thing was that racing was no different from my visualisation in the paintings I had done. I had lived it a hundred times through my art. But the rides came late. I was progressing as an artist and I was scared stiff of getting hurt. I had already had lots of accidents and I knew that that part of my life was over."

For a few years, she had the Nell Gwyn Studio, a small annexe to a house in Palace Street, but the house was sold in 2002 and she had to leave. These days she works mainly from home but, while it may have been a long journey, she has now arrived. She has had a string of solo exhibitions in galleries in London, Cambridge, Norwich, Germany, the Dubai Racing Club, and she continues to exhibit at Palace House, the former Newmarket home of Charles I, now the Tourist Information Centre. She is currently retained to produce work for a top gallery in Dublin.

She is artist in residence - the first - at the National Horse Racing Museum in Newmarket and this year, at the Animal Health Trust in Kentford. She is involved with several other charities, donating paintings for auction to raise money. She also does fabric designs. Rover Cars commissioned a scarf for Princess Anne and she has painted shirt designs for Sir Alex Ferguson and shorts designs for her friend, the boxer Colin Dunn. She has done many greetings cards and decorated porcelain for, among others, Sheikh Mohammed.

Last year, her story was featured in a six-part series by Anglia TV called Newmarket Woman which told of her dream of riding and trying to fulfil it.
"In the story, we try to buy a horse. I actually started riding out again. But the film helped complete closure on that part of my life." The heart is now entirely with the art. "I have this idea of a traveling exhibition of Romany and circus art inside a small circus tent calling myself Painted Circus. I will be traveling with a circus in Ireland this summer to produce work for the Dublin exhibition."

It's that 'can-do' thing again. You feel the energy as she says it. But now that the oscillations have stopped, the inner self also has a consolidated and established sound to it because these days it isn't so much a question of hoping to sell paintings as getting them all done. "Painted Circus might take a while," she says. "I'll have to fit it in with survival work." Jacquie's work can currently be seen at the Lawson Gallery; Cambridge, Palace House, Newmarket; Tudor Gallery, Norwich and Fiamano Gallery, Connaught Street, London.

September 2005, she will hold an exhibition at the Hunter Gallery, Long Melford.
Jacquie Jones can be contacted on 0794 759 2204.