Rare “Heart of Darkness” china glazed by Alchemy for sale

I’ve just sent a rare china piece from my collection for sale to the MyAuctionBarn site. It’s a “Heart of Darkness” Oldenburg in bay going grey glazed for me by Alchemy back when we were just getting started with the Heart of Darkness chinas (an edition that never really happened).

Why are there two of them in the photo? You’ll just have to go and read the story on the auction page here:

http://myauctionbarn.com/auction_details.php?auction_id=13943

Note: for some reason sometimes you have to go back and click the link here a second time in order to get to the MAB listing. It seems to be a flaw with the auction site.

I am also going to be selling the Breyer Porcelain “Giselle” and “Gilen” custom glazed to dark bay later this week. It’ll be a set-price sale listed here only.

UK goods made it home!

I’m delighted to report that our shipment of personal goods from England was delivered today, and everything arrived in perfect shape! All the ceramic molds look good as far as I can tell without unwrapping each one. I was worrying that US customs might have smashed them to bits to see if the mold plaster was really something else…! I’ll have a big job organizing and storing them in the coming weeks. They are all jumbled up and the only way I can tell which mold is a leg etc. is to open them up and look. (They are only labeled as to which horse they belong to, not which body part.) The two bisque china horses I customized also arrived unbroken. Hooray for that ultra-memory foam!

Speaking of foam, the molds were packed into 10 wooden crates that were lined with 4″ foam, and they let me keep all the foam! That is probably several hundred dollars worth of the stuff, which I can use when shipping finished chinas to customers. That was a very nice extra benefit on top of the amazing fact that we didn’t have to pay to get all those molds home. I still can’t believe how that all worked out. A couple years ago when I learned that I was now the owner of all those molds, I figured I was going to have to make a special trip over and pay a ton of $$$ in shipping to get them all home–and figure out just how to do it by myself.

We’ve already gotten all our clothes unpacked and put away. (We really didn’t bring that much stuff even for a potential 2-year stay, and I hardly wore a quarter of the clothes I brought.) I am so glad to see again all my little souvenirs and mementos of the places we visited in the UK. I bought art prints, art glass from Malta, hand-made stained glass from Cornwall, lots of little things from the museum shops, a crystal dram glass with etched thistle from Edinburgh… and below are my Lilliput Lane model of Windsor Castle’s Round tower, my little Stonehenge snow globe, and a really pretty mirror that looks like a stone window.

I love to have things like this around me almost more than I like to look at photos. They instantly remind me of where I was when I got them. I also bought two lovely and different pill boxes. Since I am now taking thyroid replacement pills the rest of my life, no way am I going to tote around an ugly plastic bottle. I knew if I could find such a thing anywhere it would be in the UK, and I was right. I will be reminded daily of our time in the UK from a pill box I carry with me everywhere!

All’s well that ends well!

Breakables Show Auction Donation

For my friends heading to BreyerFest in Lexington this week…

Better really late than never… Here is my donation to the Breakables Show benefit silent auction this Thursday. It is a “Halfling Boreas” in bone china, custom glazed by me to a bay tobiano. It is from my personal collection.

I mistakenly thought the show was doing raffle drawings and was all set to donate a gift certificate. Then today I was reading the website and noticed that I was supposed to be donating an auction item! So I came up with this piece. Please note that it has suffered a teensy break to the left eartip; I broke it while I was glazing it. When the rest of the horse was finished with the firings, I glued the tip back on and retouched it. You really can’t tell it was repaired at all. This one is marked #2 in the edition. I have kept it all this time because of the gorgeous shaded bay color. Now he can be yours. I’m judging at the show so I hope to see you there!

What I’m not working on this month

I confess, summer is a rotten time for me to be productive in the studio. Especially now that I’m back in Colorado and enjoying such a glorious HOT summer! And getting my tennis game back up to speed. Going to baseball games and lunches with my parents. Hikes with the Boyz, and bike rides, and camping. Paul in retirement mode coming down and suggesting we go out and do stuff, right in the middle of my work day. Sigh, what a problem to have!  🙂

I was motoring right along a few weeks ago on the above Breyer Porcelain “Giselle” and “Gilen” sculptures by Brigitte Eberl. The bay pair are the factory-issue set that I put in the kiln for a test fire and they turned out glossy but otherwise perfectly colored!! Now, in the reasoning of the model horse collecting and showing society they’d now be worthless as original finish Breyer collectibles, because they were not issued in glossy glaze and the factory didn’t gloss mine! So, it was best to just use them as “bodies” to overglaze. This means they must go darker since they were fairly dark and solid colored to begin with. The mare is almost black but with lovely reds peeking through. And the foal is now a pretty shaded dark baby bay. I just need to detail these out (eyes and hooves mostly) and then they’ll be for sale in August.

The other “Giselle” is the 2nd of two bisques that I own. I started this one a few weeks ago and is the “teaser” horse I mentioned in a previous post. The one to be sold at BreyerFest next week. Well, this got stalled too, and now I’ve ended up liking the color so much that I’m afraid am keeping her for my own collection. (Honestly, being a collector and liking your own work too much is seriously bad for the corporate income!! I really ought to be glazing colors like Appaloosa or lacy overo paints, which I really dislike, then I wouldn’t have that problem so much.) I may still change my mind about selling this “Giselle”. I do have one other bisque left and maybe when I choose its color I’ll like that one better.

I do have a desire to clean out my archive of non-Westerly china whiteware this summer/fall. So watch for those to come up for sale, even before I start on my Go To List of commissions. That is a goal for when I get back from the Kentucky break. My molds from the UK are in the US as of this writing, sitting in customs in Houston. And once my molds are here I want to get up to speed with casting and creating claybody customs from them. I realize that all my sculptures are now pretty dated and “tired”. But I need to learn casting to be ready for when I ever do complete a new sculpture, and these molds will be perfect for learning. Some people might be interested in the customs I complete. Me the collector definitely will be… I hope I will not send too many to my own china cabinet!!

I have also completely stalled out on sculpture. At least for this month. Poor Roundabout! It will just have to wait for that muse to come back around. I just signed up for a beginner oil painting class. It is just four mornings but this should be just what I need: to re-learn the ultra basics like how to prepare your canvas/surface (I actually want to paint on smooth wood rather than canvas), work with the oils, and approaches to building a painting. I haven’t used oils since high school so I definitely need a refresher. I want to paint realistic landscapes. After looking at the all the incredible masterworks in the great art museums of the world for the last 10 years, I now know what I like and the style in which I want to paint. I want to paint like Vermeer. (HA HA HA. Suuuuure.) Well you gotta start somewhere with your inspiration. I am hoping that turning my artistic focus AWAY from horses for awhile might then let get me back to them with a fresh and renewed energy.

I am so happy to be back here. It is exceedingly strange how quickly that significant experience we had for an entire YEAR has faded into the past. I still feel like I just dreamed the whole thing. One lingering clue that I did actually live in the UK is that every so often when driving and making a turn, I get a teensy twinge of panic as to which side of the street I should be on!