Two days on the Borders

Here is my account of my visit to fellow sculptor and ceramist Donna Chaney’s home and studio, for two days of working, sightseeing, and socializing.

Donna owns a picturesque farm on top of a ridge with stunning views, in Herefordshire, between Worcester and Hereford (both great small cities for visiting). This area is just so beautiful, even in winter. After the fairly flat Thames Valley, it was a refreshing change to be in a place of more dramatic scenery: rolling hill views with a classic England patchwork of farm fields and pastures, and pretty streams in the bottom of the valleys.

Here is Donna’s “driveway” and view roughly to the north
This is the view you get out of every window in her studio!
And this is in winter! It just takes your breath away in summer.

The mission for the visit was to show Donna and her painter Joanne how I airbrush-paint china horses using overglazes. Joanne paints all of Donna’s horse sculptures that are cast in earthenware, and uses underglazes. Donna’s other painter, Lorraine, is the specialist in finishing all the bone china pieces, using traditional chinapainting (overglaze) technique. I spent most of the day showing them how I make the airbrushable-liquid overglaze paints, and how it goes on. It has been a year since I have painted anything, and I had to remember a few things myself! I also brought along my air eraser, to show them how I spray away the overglaze paint to create the dapple greys.

Donna’s lovely stone farmhouse
Donna and Joanne in the painting studio
Mark, Donna’s mold maker and casting master, who incidentally made all the molds for my sculptures. Without him I wouldn’t have had the joy of my work in ceramic these last 10 years! (Everyone calls him “Moldy Mark”.)
The converted stable block (where all the studios and workrooms are)… from Donna’s mare Foalie’s point of view in the paddock. She “talks” to everyone who walks past.
On Friday morning I took a drive due west and crossed the border into Wales. I was hoping to be able to spend a vacation week touring the parts of Wales we didn’t get to the first time we were in the UK. But now with our stay cut short by 9 months that’s not going to happen. So I decided I had to at least peek over there one more time. I drove into an area called the Brecon Beacons National Park, which had some higher mountains with valleys carved between them. It was threatening rain showers all day so the highest point I could see was shrouded in cloud. And you could still see some snow in the crevices! They aren’t the Rocky Mountains but beautiful in their own way, with farms all down the slopes. It does feel like a different country with all the signage in both Welsh and English.
Brecon Beacons
Lambing season is underway
Hay-on-Wye’s little town square

On the way west I stopped in Hay-on-Wye, a small town famous for hosting a huge book festival every year. It was pretty sleepy this March morning, and hard to imagine how they cope with thousands of book fans thronging their few small streets! They did have quite a few book stores but I was there too early in the morning and everything was closed. Just as well, as I didn’t really have the time to get lost for hours in a book store!

I joined Donna and her team for a couple more hours Friday afternoon, and then I went off for a look at a National Trust property near Worcester that Donna recommended, Witley Hall:

It is a typical not-huge 1800’s stately home… with a twist. It was gutted in a fire in the 1930’s and just left that way. Even though it’s not that old, it is just a roofless ruin open to the elements so parts of it look almost ancient-Rome with the classical columns growing weeds and lichen. The setting and grounds are stunning, which makes me wonder why it was given to the state rather than just scraped off and sold for someone else to build their palace on!

Friday night Donna and her partner Charles, Joanne and her partner Phil, and I, met back up for a totally fun dinner over at a pub/restaurant next to my hotel in Hereford. It is always entertaining to compare notes between our countries, resulting in a lot of laughs!

On Saturday I had intended to drive up to Birmingham to visit the famous Crufts dog show (the UK’s equivalent of our Westminster Kennel Club dog show), and see the Keeshond classes. But I woke up early and found I just wasn’t into it that morning. I was already missing my three Boyz and it was to be a beautiful weekend and I just wanted to get home and enjoy it with them. (I did see 3 days of top Kees’s last year at their National show in Colorado Springs, and I suppose that one dog show is pretty like another.) So I just drove home on a leisurely route through Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, watching the sun slowly burn off the mist.

Roundabout: Gone but not to be forgotten

Today I decided that the Roundabout cob sculpture is not to be completed this spring. In fact, I have torn it completely down and put away the armature it was built on.

The main thing that did him in, was what I learned about the work after fellow equine artist Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig wrote a superb critique of it. I submitted the sculpture for an ongoing article series called “Windward”, in the Realistic Equine Sculpture Society’s quarterly publication, The Boat. The critique was tremendous help for me and the crucial thing was that I needed to lengthen the horse’s back. It was the root of the problems I was having getting the front and back to unite, and the leg lengths. (Among other things!)

Well, that ended up being the death-knell for this sculpture (as-is). The store-bought armature I built the sculpture on had some problems and this was the last straw. I won’t go into all the issues but the main one is that there just wasn’t enough wire in there to lengthen the back. And the kinds of workarounds I could have devised would have just added more hassle to the process of sculpting. I still have a lot to learn about sculpting in clay, but I do know that if your armature isn’t right it impedes the creative flow that gets going when you are really working the clay!

I realized today that instead of working “crippled” it would be better to just start over in the US. There, I can use an existing armature stand I have, one that I know won’t cause me even more problems when I get to the master-resin casting stage (as this one was going to). If the sculpture was going OK I could have lived with it, but now as I need to add more wire to the back end, I might as well start over with the totally right thing.

I am NOT giving up on this work. I have such a wealth of information now, and I’ve been at it long enough I feel like I know the horse!! Rather than feel like this was a huge setback, I feel really relieved. It will be great to just start over at home!Last week I had lunch with a new UK friend, Caroline Jones, and at her house I found this PERFECT photo she had taken, of the cob horse I want Roundabout to be. This will help keep me inspired and ready to get back to it in June:

It is in the EXACT position I was going for!

Tomorrow I drive over to Donna Chaney’s studio for two days of ceramics glazing. That will be a great break. I was going to attend the Crufts dog show in Birmingham on the Saturday but I have since decided I’d rather tour the Welsh borders a little bit on the way home. My aunt Joan told me the other day that my uncle Norm’s family are direct descendants of the family who occupied Goodrich Castle and I want to go see it! (Anyway I got to see plenty of top Keeshonds at their US national specialty show last year!)

I’ll be picking up the “Boreas” molds at Donna’s, the last ones I’m missing. I am totally avid to get my hands on them to start casting and custom sculpting, but I really should not cast anything else until I get home because I can’t get back to Donna’s after this weekend. The next 2 months are going to be crazy/busy. I’d hate to finish a custom Boreas and then not be able to get it fired to bisque. I can’t ship unfired greenware home! I’m a little freaked out just with the idea of driving two of them in the car tomorrow, they are so fragile.

I still need something to do with my idle time here so I am going to work on the “Clarity” sculpture. I still like it very much and if I really focused I should be able to get it further along. (I have a feeling the name is going to change, though!)

That’s all the art news for now. I gave up on writing a post about Belgium for now. Though I want at least share a few photos in a more general post about more life in the UK etc. We haven’t done much that is that exciting to write about, it being such a dreary long winter! I am delighted that we never got any more snow in February but it has been uniformly cold and wet until last week. We are now on about 9 days without rain and seeing more sun, and the daffodils are about to bloom in the garden… there is a hope for spring!

My mom is having major surgery the week of the 22nd of March, and I’m flying back to Boulder to support her and my dad for the first week. We are praying for a good outcome, mom, and a speedy uneventful recovery. You deserve it! I am looking forward to seeing Boulder again, if a little earlier than I expected to!

I have the car this afternoon, so now the Boyz and I are off to explore a new wooded area (with an actual Car Park!) that I discovered the other day!

Totally off-topic: Don’t ignore your thyroid!

It’s been a year now since I learned that I had an under-functioning thyroid gland. I can not believe how getting it back up to normal has made such a positive difference in my life !

The thyroid plays such a large part in regulating your body systems and hormones. I’m pretty sure mine had been dis-functioning for at least 10 years, and I am not now the person I was during those years!! Intellectually, it is pretty disturbing to think that your glands can rule your actions and mind/personality, but I have experience that they absolutely do. I had all the classic symptoms ranging from mood swings, mild depression/negativity, lack of energy/enthusiasm, feeling cold all the time (when I used to always be hot), hair loss, poor skin tone… It’s not like you change abruptly from one day to the next, but I look back on the last decade and realize that it was a pretty rough ride, including ruining some relationships and not feeling creative/motivated as an artist among other things!

I used to consider myself to be mostly an optimist with a sunny, go-for-it personality, and this past year I can see how I got back to that. I even lost nearly 20 pounds as my metabolism also had crapped out because the thyroid wasn’t running it. I was unhappy at first to learn I’ll have to take a (fortunately inexpensive) prescription drug every day the rest of my life, after making it 50 years without being on a single drug for anything. But now I embrace it because I know how important it is. Many many people, mostly women, for some reason have diminishing thyroid function in middle age. It’s not just menopause, either. I can’t really find an explanation of WHY this happens, when I surf the web. Maybe it is because there is such a good synthetic thyroid replacement drug that it seems like nobody is bothering to do more research. My chiropractor/naturopath says it’s because we don’t get the essential nutrients that used to support the thyroid in our food anymore.

Anyway, I’ve become a bit of an advocate for getting one’s thyroid checked (a simple blood test) so this was my testimonial! Thanks for reading!

Watering-trough for horses in Bruges, Belgium

All systems go!

Many many thanks to everyone who emailed me about still getting this blog’s posts. Whew! When I started up this blog, I had to make a google account. Then last year I created a gmail account and should have just added it to the google account that I already had for the blog. Yesterday I merged the two by moving my blog over, to have just one google account. I’ve been changing my email address to the gmail one for anything I do on the web, to cut back on the tons of spam I was getting. It has worked great so far!

We just got back from a week in Bruges, Belgium, taking the EuroStar high speed train service through the channel tunnel for the first time. I will post a report later. Must now lose about 5 pounds I gained last week, just from eating Belgian french fries (frites), Belgian chocolate, and Belgian waffles, eeeek!