on the hunt for a horse

ava (my 2 1/2 year old........ah so now you know why i dont blog very often - plus our 4 year old .....but that is another blog) so anyhow i finally realized that if this horse sculpture is going to be any good then i better get a real horse to sculpt. i let my fingers do the walking and found this equestrian center about 5 minutes from grandma's house (ie my studio) so off ava and i went to see what it was all about - plus i couldnt get anyone on the phone + ava loves horses.
so as we wound through tractville houses i have to say this place was like a little jewel stepping back in time. i/we loved it. when we got there it was empty, just a guy cleaning out stalls and he said we could look around, must of been about 50 horses or more boarded there......it was clean and just felt like another era almost, like we really were out in the country, made me miss my horse and wish we could have one...........ava and "big john" particularly seemed to hit it off. later i came back just by myself and the owner's daughter? was there, soooo nice, offered to pull a horse out of the stalls for me to sculpt. i opted instead to just set up shop by several horses as you can see.........i loved this place, want to go back and actually go on a ride (they do tours for 30 bucks an hour). oh i guess i should talk about my new series..........that shall be my next blog!

blue skies ahead...or just simply branch and box and the new series i am working on

why this is underlining is just so par for the course with me..........anyhow, the branch and boxes you see are all part of this new series i am working on...that actually the horse is a part . i am creating a series in which i am trying to explore memory and transcendence, loss and longing. this is a body of work that i have been 'working' on in my head and actually trying out parts of it in different forms for a few years now,,,,,and it wasn't til just recently that it hit me i should be just sculpting it more in the traditional, since that is what i do in general! i would like to bronze most if not all of the pieces..sounds so obvious but i had been experimenting with plaster topographies for one as in the horse piece, which i had photographed and titled 'the morning Hope ran away"........i wanted to capture that moment in more of a straight sculpture form...which is challenging...to make it mine and fresh and yet i cant get away from the fact that it will be a bronze horse sculpture when i am done.......i have been waiting a long time to see if more traditional sculptural mediums will ever come back, not that i will stop doing them, and i remember when painting as in portraiture was such a no no and now everyone is doing it....so fascinating how the art world isn't to far from the fashion world in that sense...anyhow i digress. i feel i am finally working on a series that really comes from my heart, and still is done in the medium and with the craft level that at this point i have spent years working on. the horse sculpture and each piece in this series has to do with a moment in time or an aspect of my childhood and also loss....the week before my one brother john got married he took me on an overnight horseback camping trip......this would be our last adventure before he sort of left our own family.....it felt like that to me...even though he would still be around, and his wife was my best friend....there was both a simultaneous sense of loss and that this would be a memory for the rest of my life, something i would hang on to - a permanence to it. in the morning after we had camped i discovered that my horse Hope had pulled loose from her rope and was gone. we spent hours finding her and then trying to catch her. that moment so perfectly illustrates to me what i am trying to express...hopefully the peice can capture some of this. i want to do Hope just in that instant that she saw me, was startled and before she started to run...........i also am considering adding an element to the base but more on that later...am not sure how confidant i am to actually post those ideas!

the boxes and branch is something i will talk about more next time..............my kids are calling!