This is a re-post. Sorry for the hassle! I will be quiet now, promise!

I’ve just listed my donation for the Melissa and Herman fundraising effort. It is my Hagen-Renaker “Ferseyn” overglazed bay tobiano.

Here is the auction link. It is a 5-day auction hosted on the MyAuctionBarn site (a site developed just to sell model horse items). 100% of the sale goes directly to Mel.

http://myauctionbarn.com/auction_details.php?auction_id=138643

And here is the link to the Flying Heart Fundraiser website, where you can find all upcoming sales and auctions to benefit Melly:

http://www.rhiannondesign.com/Melly/

It is a work-in progress, so bookmark it and keep checking back! Lots of cool things will be appearing soon!

My best wishes to Mel and Herman.

If you’ve landed here via the web you’ve found my blog’s new home and I thank you for coming. If you just signed up for the email feed and you get this as an email, can you drop me a quick note to let me know you saw it to westerlydesign@gmail.com? Still checking to see how fast this all arrives various places.

Thank you!

Karen

Some Actual News:

Myself and a bunch of model horse hobby china artists, collectors, and friends are organizing a fundraising effort to help out Melissa Gaulding and her husband Herman who are in financial straits right now due to medical bills. I’ve chosen a custom glazed horse from my own collection and will be auctioning it on MyAuctionBarn, with all the money going directly to Melissa. It should be up in a day or two. Also, a central web page is being developed soon which will list all the donations offered for sale or auction by everyone taking part. I’ll post it when known.

I’m writing this from my kitchen in Boulder, not long before I crash into bed. The Boyz and I made it back to the USA without any problems, what a relief!

I have this strange feeling like… did I dream the whole past year? Especially since I traveled the same week as last year, and everything looks the same as I left it!

Here is the last photo I took in the UK. The Boyz were quite a sensation in Heathrow; everyone wanted to know what breed they were and where they were going! They endured all the traveling like champions and are doing great. They definitely recognized their street and house and back yard!

In no particular order.

The gorgeous country landscape/scenery. I understand now why so many people have waxed poetic and artistic about “this green and pleasant land.” This country is waging a fight to keep their open spaces from encroaching development and expanding population. I hope they succeed. It is their national treasure.

The commercial-free BBC. I watched far more television this year than I usually do, because they show everything from great documentaries to movies. However I never did get into any of their drama series or sit-coms. I also love all the BBC radio channels. You can get them no matter where you are in the country!

Being a short train-ride away from all the arts and cultural events available in London. I knew this was going to be fantastic and I was not disappointed this year!

Custard creme biscuits (cookies)! I’m totally addicted.

The roundabouts. A much better way to drive and manage traffic; sometimes you hardly have to stop at all!

The horsey neighborhood we live in where people ride down the streets! And the polo team, and the 3 horses in the pasture near where we did a lot of walkies every week.

Seeing Windsor Castle up on its hill, often visible from many of my favorite walking or cycling paths. Being able to visit such an amazing historical place so easily and often!

The Thames. And the perfect towns along it right here in my area, which wouldn’t show up in the average tourist guidebooks. The incredible Thames Path, on which you could walk all the way from Oxfordshire to the sea east of London. We did ramble a lot of it!

All the splendid coastlines. Each place I went to was different in some way. Hard to believe there could be such diversity of geography in this relatively small island. Beachy Head is my hands-down favorite sea-place. In fact, I’ve decided it’s my #1 most favorite place in the UK, out of all the places I’ve been. With the coves and coastlines of Cornwall a very close second. Now, back to land-locked Colorado, sigh!

Pubs. Will totally miss pubs. They were our savior when traveling and hungry and stuck practically in the middle of nowhere. The smallest most local ones can be so nice; they often have such a genuine unpretentious homey atmosphere. Like you’re in the living room for the whole neighborhood. And many of them allow your dogs in!! Some of the ones we’ve been to, you’d get this delicious feeling of time having stood still for maybe a couple centuries. Even the pubs that are part of a franchise/chain, have often done such a perfect job of appearing old that you can’t tell they’re new! Our USA stamped-out chain restaurants will seem even more plastic, fake, noisy, and busy after being here for a year.

The polite and quiet and dignified Brits. Americans really ARE loud and annoying in public! I notice it now when I see American tourists in London or in airports, etc., and I am embarrassed for us. Though I wish the Brits were a little more outgoing overall; then maybe I would have met more of them!

The Tower of London, probably the most famous (and most visited) castle in England. That’s me by the infamous Traitor’s Gate.

Victorian architecture. It is sort of disrespected by the Brits because there is so much of it and I guess to them it isn’t “old enough”, but to me it is wonderfully grand and I love the over-the-top design stylings. Especially all the train stations and other large spaces with vaulted glass ceilings and ornate ironwork. It is such an expression of the power and affluence and exuberance (and their patronage of the arts) of that time when Britain were masters of the universe!

Gardens and growing things. I have been completely indifferent to gardens until living here. Colorado is going to look pretty Barren when I get back! Maybe Paul will follow through with his retirement desire to work in our yard and grow more things. (I may have a new appreciation for gardens but that still doesn’t mean I ever want to work on one myself, ha ha!)

Though I do NOT get the whole fixation with hedges over here, guess I never will. I can’t believe how huge and massive some of them are. And if they are old enough, the local council will not allow you to cut it down! One of the few things I liked about winter here was that when the hedges lost their leaves you were finally able to see through them into places where you couldn’t before. You could get the larger/longer landscape views for a change. I am sure I missed seeing a lot of great things due to a freakin’ hedge. (Though of course the owners of said great scenic thing probably want it that way.)

English cucumbers. I had no idea there was more than one kind of cucumber, but English ones have so much more flavor! I’m pretty sure I have seen them in the USA produce department; I hope so.

Well there’s more… but if I keep going on like this I will never be able to get on that plane in 12 days!

To my friends and family who read this blog, I warn you that this installment won’t make much sense to you. This one is written just for my followers and friends who participate in the model horse collecting and showing hobby, a wonderful yet weird little community I’ve grown up with since I was a teen. But I’ll try to write in some background so maybe it will work for everyone.

All my life I’ve had this single-minded thing where the only way I wanted to express my artistic talent was through horses. It’s been sooo single-minded for me there’s probably something wrong with that, ha.

I’ve collected model horses since I was small, and because I like to paint, naturally started painting them over in different colors. Then I discovered the model horse showing hobby, which in the 1970’s was all about sending photos of our collections through the mail as we judged each others photos in “shows”. We had a newsletter and I learned that people were not stopping with just repainting their plastic horses, they were totally reworking them. We called that customizing.

In my busiest customizing period in the 1980’s as an adult, it was my hobby and I did it because it was fun. By then we were holding “live” shows where we traveled to compete models in person instead of in photos. Totally fun!! I never would have been to so many cities and towns in the US if not for that hobby.

I had absolutely no pretensions that what I was making was fine art or any ambitions for turning it into a livelihood. People liked my work enough that I could sell the ones I wasn’t showing anymore, and that paid for other model horses I wanted to collect (mostly china horses) and my travel. I had such self-confidence though I was utterly uneducated in horse anatomy, didn’t own a horse, didn’t ride, in fact hardly ever interacted with the “real” thing. I just didn’t care; the horse I made looked pleasing and correct enough to me. It was something I did on nights and weekends, without pressure and lots of love.

Moving to sculpting horses in clay in the mid-1990’s was a natural progression because customizing was so darn aggravating and difficult. Wrangling that plastic Breyer horse into a new position involved using noisy, messy, and (possibly) toxic processes and tools. It was such a delight to start from scratch instead of trying to force your vision/style onto another artist’s work! Which is what we are doing. In order to make it truly yours, you have to resculpt every inch of that model. It is such a laughable no-brainer to just start from scratch, I wonder why we still do this, honestly. The clay is so pleasurable to work, you can make endless changes, feels good to the hands, and the process is peaceful quiet bliss.

Somewhere between my first original sculpture and the tenth, I lost that innate basic-to-my-soul contentment to ‘innocently” make horses. The model horse hobby got so competitive and demanding, and the technical realism bar got raised so far so fast. I got caught up in the ego-trip need to be in the top of the game, and also to make it into a business rather than a hobby. I started thinking of it as art with a capital A. It became all about how many resin or china copies I could sell. Well, instead I became so obsessed about the next sculpture not being good enough that I completely seized up with fear of failure and therefore created nothing. For more than 3 years now.

I stood in the shower one day last week (oddly enough) and this hit me like a shot of cold water: the hobby that I loved has changed, but I haven’t. I am still stuck firmly in the 1980’s!! (Hey, just like my music preferences!) Well, my Shower Revelation is that I have finally made my peace with this. I can’t sculpt to the new level. I don’t want to, either. (I’ve been saying that last bit for a few years now—sort of defensively by way of an excuse—but in my heart was still wanting to make some glorious comeback with my next work.)

So let this be a warning. If you are still going along with me here at Westerly Design Equine Art, you’re not going to find the Next Big Thing. You’re only going to get What Karen Made Next. And it may well be Frankie Goes To Hollywood, not Lady Gaga!!