The Denver area just set a new record for number of consecutive days of 90°-plus heat. Blech! (But it’s a dry heat, thank goodness!) We don’t have air conditioning in our house, and honestly you’d only want it for about 2 months a year so I’m glad we never paid to have it installed and the costs on our energy bill. But this summer sure is testing our endurance. I’m still playing tennis 3 days a week—but really early in the morning—and the boys don’t get the evening walk until after 7pm.

My studio is on the ground floor of the house, and 3 of the walls are built into the sloping lot, so it stays cool no matter what the daytime temp in the summer. The boyz have figured this out and they stay down here with me. They’ve taken over the spare bed we moved down here when Paul started working out of the home. (I used to have a couch and coffee table over there, which was nice back when I had graphic design clients in for meetings.) Because the bed is now the doggie playpen, it looks like this all the time:

I can’t keep it made because they wrestle and dig around in the bedding. Oh well. Good thing I’m pretty much the slacker housekeeper anyway.

By the way, I figured out why the new horse sculpture seemed familiar. I think I might be channelling Doris Lindner just a bit:

I own 5 Lindner Royal Worcester pieces, and two of them have a little of the motion and leg positions of my new guy.

Now, I can hear you saying, “I know Doris Lindner and you’re no Doris Lindner!!” Absolutely right! I would never presume to compare the quality of my sculpture work to hers. But I think it’s kind of cool to imagine that revered equine artists who have passed are out there somewhere looking over the shoulders of living artists who worship them.

My air compressor remains in the shop, so I can’t do any glazing work with the airbrush. It’s all at a stand-still! But I did make 4 Keeshond tiles, and I’m plugging away at the sculpture. Though I’m feeling a little stuck on it at the moment. I’m having trouble with the whole right side/legs of the sculpture and I don’t think I’ve got the action right. It just doesn’t look right. I have a bad feeling that I need to reverse the action of the legs or have the head turning the other way, but I’m not ready to go there yet!

I did finish another Hagen-Renaker “Sheba” custom glaze last week, for a customer in California. It’s a warm dappled fleabit grey. I completely re-painted the eyes and think the head is especially pretty:

I want to congratulate Lisa Sents, whose custom glazed Optime won the National Champion CM Glaze China Halter-Light/Gaited at the 2008 NAN show in Kentucky last week:

That’s the only result I know of, because they don’t show photos of the Top Ten winners. I’d love to hear if any of my other work top tenned at NAN.

The odd thing about this new clay horse is, that I keep having this itchy feeling that I have seen it before. I hope it is not because it is too similar to someone else’s sculpture!! Or maybe it has been lurking in the back of my mind these last 2 years of hopelessly non-starter sculptures and not wanting to sculpt at all? Waiting for the right time? Maybe so, because I am incredibly charged up about this one and I am actually disappointed it’s now Friday night and the weekend is here. That means it is now “quality family time” and I won’t get back to the studio until Monday. And oooh I don’t want to wait that long!

I got some more time on the sculpture this week mainly because my air compressor decided to stop working. (Maybe protesting the heat wave!) So it’s in the shop, and I get to do things like sculpt and cast Keeshond tiles instead. Never mind that I have 4 china horses I really wanted to get started now. The last thing I did before the compressor failed was spray clear gloss glaze on a whole batch of horses, so I’m surrounded by these lovely shiny white horses at the moment! They all look so wonderful in glossy white, sometimes I wonder why anyone would want to color them.

I received a nice surprise in a box from England today: a claybody-custom bone china Caprice made for me by Donna Chaney!

I asked if she might be able to remove the existing mane braids and replace it with a short neat mane and forelock, and slim down the tail a bit. She was able to accomplish this in the greenware stage, before firing the china for the first time. (I wanted to be able to take this china to model horse shows and exhibit it in both english and western tack, which motivated me to ask Donna if she’d be interested in giving the changes a try. Ironic that I got this piece right when I think I am done with performance showing…!) Anyway, I’m totally thrilled to have this one-of-a-kind china in my collection. Now, what color should he be, hmmm!

Here’s another shot of the new horse in the works.

I’ve got the limbs and the proportions more or less where I want them. So I’ve started refining refining refining. You can see how much clay I’ve carved off; lots more to go! He’s no longer going to carry the “Imperium” name. That’s for some other work, someday. This one has morphed beyond that idea and will need a much more fun and exuberant name—which is how I feel about the project so far anyway!

Unresolved… is this horse going to be able to stand on those 3 legs??

What a difference a day makes.
I walked into my studio yesterday morning, took one look at “The Imp”, and what I saw was… “Booooooring!”

What I wanted to see instead was some action!

I know what I need right now in my equine sculpting life/evolution, is to be seriously challenged. To get pushed right out of my little cozy comfort zone, or I pretty soon am just going to end up not sculpting horses at all. For me to attempt to sculpt a heavy warmblood-type stallion who is starting to turn/pivot as his head swings around to look at something, is about as challenging as I can get as far as horse anatomy and biomechanics is concerned. I will likely fail… but wow I love the movement so far and you should have seen the clay being flung about and my hands flying as I strove to get the clay to do what I was seeing in my head!

Unfortunately I had to stop before I could get into the back half of the horse and work out what those back legs should be doing. Yesterday I strained my back trying to lift a 5-gallon bucket of earthenware slip (what was I thinking??), so it hurts to work in an upright-back position too long. (I had to stand to do this much, sitting is worse!)

Anyway, wheee I’m really excited now!