No pictures this time, just a lot of words. Paul is in Istanbul this week and I’ve been meaning to write a long ramble about what it’s like to live here, since I just passed the 4-month mark this week. So here it is. In no particular order. With some political opinion thrown in.

I expected that living in a new country (rather than just visiting for a week) would give real insight into how the way of life differs, the culture, the values. And it’s true. I don’t think life in England differs that much than in the US… in the daily go-to-the-grocery-store kind of thing. But I am definitely in a different country. Sometimes I can’t understand the what someone is saying, and they’re speaking english! And there are women here who really do sound exactly like those screechy matrons in Monty Python sketches!

I’ve been reading the newspaper every day (The London Times) plus getting the really-local Maidenhead weekly paper. Thanks to those two we’ve learned about events and places that would be pretty much under the radar of a tourist who relied only on a guidebook. I’ve been to a couple local fairs. We’re talking the kind of fair that has a dog show with classes like “waggiest tail”, and agricultural shows for your biggest tomato. I saw a local youth horse show that was EXACTLY like the old Thelwell cartoons of little girls on ponies that refuse jumps, etc.

Thanks to The Times we have learned about local events and festivals in London and elsewhere. We’ve gone to the Thames Festival and the Notting Hill Carnival in London. The Notting Hill Carnival celebrates the area’s Caribbean roots with food (jerk chicken, ummm!) and a wonderful parade with the loudest music I have ever heard. Each parade group had costumed dancers and/or a float preceded by a truck with a DJ surrounded by stacks and stacks of speakers. Our chests were literally vibrating it was so loud!! The Thames Festival was 2 days of events all along the Thames river in London. The day we went, they were having the Feast on the Bridge. They closed off Southwark Bridge to cars and placed two looooong dining tables with chairs all the way across it. You got food at all kinds of stands at one end, then sat down and ate on the bridge! They had a boat parade and all kinds of other activities (like fireworks) along the river. The Thames riverside walks have been improved so much since we first visited London back in the late 1990’s. Now you can walk miles and miles right along the river and see so much more. And we can be right there in about an hour’s travel from our house.

Unfortunately I lost my photos from July-early September in the hard drive crash, or I’d share pictures from these events.

I just read about the British Ceramics Biennial starting this week in Stoke-on-Trent, which I would surely have missed if I wasn’t reading the paper and here long enough to find out about it. I think if Paul can get away, we’re going to do a week-long trip (in another dog-friendly cottage) up north in the Peak District near Stoke and Manchester. We can do the ceramics exhibitions plus some great hikes in the Peaks, and even go check out Liverpool, etc. We haven’t been to that part of England on any of our past trips here.

Thanks to the paper plus listening to talk radio in Britain, I’m getting a handle on their politics. It is an election year and it will be pretty interesting to be here while that is going on next spring. Listening to the callers to the radio shows is a great way to hear about what real people are thinking, not just media writers. I listen to two different BBC stations plus a commercial one. Fortunately there are no syndicated shows like Rush Limbaugh over here. The presenters change every couple hours and cover all kinds of social and political topics of the day.

It is totally refreshing to have almost no USA news. I don’t miss one bit any of the USA media obsession/saturation with extremes of the left vs. right politics, and our idiotic celebrity culture. Over here, they have their very own set of politicians, tv stars, music stars, etc., and I hadn’t heard of hardly any of them. We get the bigger USA news and some commentary overview, that’s about it. I knew it would be really really good to step outside our country and get the perspective on what the rest of the world is doing and thinking about. And what I’ve learned is, that the USA isn’t the center of the universe. People really mostly care about what is going on in their town and county. “When will my road get repaired?” I’ve always heard that Americans are so self-centered, but I think it is the same everywhere. We just think we are the center of the world, because our media doesn’t show enough of what else is going on.

One of the problems getting the loudest noise over here at the moment is the large number of unemployed/school drop out youths running wild and with no support or prospects, and the drunken “yobs” in bars ruining all the town centers on weekend nights. I hate to say it but getting plastered does seem to be the national pasttime. Far more than in the US.

There is a lot more expectation that the government should solve every moral and social problem. Far far more than in the US. And they already do pay out a lot of money for all kinds of things we don’t, but I can’t see the society as a whole being any better for it. The socialistic slant here is actually kind of uncomfortable.

I have had an interesting experience with the famous British National Health System. In June I needed to get a booster shot for the Hepatitis A and B vaccine, plus a blood test to see how my thyroid supplements are working. I didn’t really understand how it all works here but our private health insurance said to get established with a GP here. So I did some webbing and found a local GP. When I got there it turns out it is the local NSH GP. They told me that since I’m a resident, I can get their services free like any other Brit. When I met the nurse she told me that the Hep AB booster shot wasn’t to be done for 6 months, and in the course of other discussions she said in the UK they don’t do mammograms for anyone until age 50 and then only once every 5 years! (As opposed to the US where they recommend it every year starting at age 40.) Hmmm. Anyway, I was told to come back in Sept for the shots and blood test.

This past month I found out from the insurer that what I really wanted was a private GP. So I did more webbing and found one of those instead. And honestly we didn’t feel it was right to use the NSH when we hadn’t been paying taxes etc. in to support the system. So I met with the private GP and she said the NSH nurse gave me the wrong info; I should have had the Hep AB booster 2 months ago. I know that is a minor thing, but it did make me wonder about the revered NSH. Especially as health care debate is all over the US right now and they keep pointing to the one over here as the star. The issue here is, who does decide when you should get important health screenings and treatments? When your government is paying–and they don’t have as much money for it now because of the tanked economy–what do they cut back on in health care??

Ummm. And Now For Something Completely Different.

Now that I’m used to it, I actually like driving. Roundabouts are GREAT. You practically never have to stop because there are not that many traffic lights–you mostly see lights just in town centers where the intersections are too small for circles.

I like that there is almost no visual pollution, at least in the country towns I have seen and here where I live. By that I mean, no billboards or excessive signage on buildings. Not a lot of lit signs or neon. The councils must have strict laws about signs so they are very small or not there at all. Though that makes it hard to find a store or shopping center sometimes, they are so hidden! Plus there are hedges and shrubs everywhere bordering everything, so sight-lines are often short to non-existent. I drove past the Boyz’ boarding kennel three times before I learned where it was.

I never did get used to seeing women wearing BOOTS in July. I’m talking everything from high boots with high heels, to those fleece-lined UGGs types, all summer. And on 70-degree sunny days, too!! I can’t imagine the discomfort! I came from a place where I didn’t wear long pants from May to October. Though here I have been mostly wearing jeans and the kinds of light clothes you wear in spring and fall. It’s just not that hot here. And they complain when it gets anywhere near to 80°. Someone on the radio sighed with relief that the summer was over. I’ve heard it jokes that the Brits don’t really “get” summer all that well, they’d rather keep their pasty white skin covered up, ha. I always liked winter clothes better than summer so I’ll be happy enough for the next months I guess.

I love the morning fog. It’s really coming in now that the nights are getting colder but we still have these nice warmer sunny days. September was by far the loveliest month here yet. Mostly dry and still warm.

I Love Pubs. No matter where you are, you are close to one and can get something to eat and drink most of the time, and a place to sit down and nobody will bother you. We are not coffee drinkers so the whole coffee shop/cafe culture passes us completely by. I would never even think of going into a Starbucks. But pubs must serve the same purpose, in a more homey way. And the older ones are just so interesting! I love the way you just walk in and order your food and drinks at the bar, and pay. Then they bring your food to you. You don’t have to wait for the server at the end of the meal, you just leave when done.

So far I think you can’t get a decent cheeseburger in the UK. I keep trying, but they are invariably so overcooked they are like a hockey puck. And you can’t tell what kind of bread/bun it will come with, or what the cheese will be like. On the other hand, at McDonald’s over here the quality of their average burger is aMAzing!! Always fresh, hot, cheese melting, bun toasted… I can’t understand it! I can’t tell you how often in the US I’ll get a regular cheeseburger that is old and cold with the cheese half off the side. And I should know, I’m a McD Connoisseur. So for now if I need a burger fix I go to McDs here. And I’m Lovin’ It!

Also re: food. When they say your burger comes with a salad, they mean the onion and lettuce garnish on or next to your burger. Don’t expect a tossed salad, ha ha. I can’t find an “American style” Italian restaurant. By that I mean your ultra-basic, Sopranos-style red-sauce-on-everything, spag joint. They have lots and lots of italian restaurants here, with really nice perfectly fine pasta menus but it’s clearly all based on the Italy/European model. They just don’ know from meatballs and they never heard of Chicken Parm (my ultimate comfort food, sob!). And not a simple greens salad with italian vinaigrette dressing in sight. Which is what I was raised on in NY. So I sure miss that. Give me a run of the mill American chain like Olive Garden or Carrabba’s right now and I’d swoon!

By the way their fries (chips) are great. Not surprising since the UK has been making fish and chips for eons. I just don’t like the fish part. Oh, and their potato chips are called crisps. And they come in the sort of packaging that would make a Boulder tree-hugging recycler have fits. You can’t just buy a big bag of crisps. You have to buy a big bag, with all the crisps divided into 12 little sealed plastic bags. Each about a handful. And these little bags are too small and brittle to be re-used even as doggie poop pickup-bags. So if you want a nice bowl of chips you have to sit there and de-bag a dozen little bags. And you are left with this quite big pile of plastic bags to throw away. All the stores here are proclaiming how green we must all be and we have dutifully bought our re-useable grocery bags. Yet NObody has mentioned once getting rid of all the crisp-bags, aaaargh!

We are learning to love to drink soda warm, with no ice. You just can’t get it served to you with ice. And people here don’t even keep their soda in the fridge, they pour it right out of the bottles warm at home, too! But happily, there has been a revolution about drinking beer, and now they take pride in how cold they can serve it to you!

Most “foodies” will be utterly disgusted with me after reading all that, and I apologize. I’m just not into haute cuisine. I specialize in Low Cuisine and getting it served here is proving all over the map!

I love the horsey place we landed in. Yesterday I took the Boyz in the car to find a new place to walk. Over here, most all owned land has to have signposted public access via footpaths or bridlepaths (which are good for bikes too). Which is tremendous!! You can walk so many places where in the USA think how much of the best land is private, marked sternly No Trespassing. Here, the main trick is finding a place to park near a footpath. Yesterday we were driving down this little road we hadn’t been to before, a couple miles from the house, when we come upon a Cross-Country riding meet in full swing! In the middle of the afternoon, on a Wednesday! Horses jumping fences! I keep stumbling across things like this. People ride down the village street here. That Tudor house near here has a polo team. About once a week in the early evening they have matches. I haven’t found a way to get close enough to watch them because their polo pitch is in the center of their land. And I can’t find anything on the web about their team or league. But next time I see them I’m going to get into the woods off their bridle path and see if I can get closer.

Well, I guess that’s enough of this for now! I’ll save up another pile of little lifestyle musings for another 4 months from now.

Oh one last thing: I heard a funny expression today. Someone referred to an unhappy/disgruntled person as “throwing their toys out of the pram”. Made me laugh out loud.

Cheers!

Finally, I am getting round to writing about our magical week in August, in a “self-catering” cottage at the very very southwestern tip of Cornwall’s Penrith Peninsula.

We were only a few miles from Land’s End, and the cottage was walking distance to the incredible Coast Path where you can walk pretty much the entire coastline of Cornwall. I feel so fortunate to have found this simply wonderful dog-friendly cottage in such short notice. (I started looking in June and most properties were fully booked.) The cottage was on a farm in the middle of cultivated fields which went right up to the cliffs on the coast, incredibly quiet and serene. We brought our bicycles and aside from 2 days where we took the car to other parts of western Cornwall, we never left this area the whole time. Cycling and walking the coast path to the villages and beaches was enough.

Here’s the cottage and a view of the coast closest to our cottage:

The nearest village of any size was St Buryan. It stands on one of the higher points of the peninsula and all week as we were exploring around you could catch glimpses of the church tower from where ever we were. The village has an ancient crossroads marker (we had such fun spotting these out in the fields and along the roads), a post office, a teensy grocery, and a pub. I have become totally besotted with english pubs and we had a drink and a meal here one evening. It was only about a mile walk there using a public footpath across the fields:

I took soooo many photos of the beaches. They are truly as gorgeous as everyone says. When the sun came out, they glowed aqua. I had a hard time deciding whether these beaches or the ones in Hawaii were more beautiful. There were dog-friendly beaches and we visited three of them. What a delight! It was far too cold to swim but I did wade in with the Boyz. I did find out that I don’t have beach dogs. After the first experience, they really didn’t want to go in the water except to wade a little bit. I think they don’t like the taste of the salt water, and even the little tiny waves were disconcerting. I was sure that KitKat the avid swimmin’ dog would love a beach but I guess not. When we let him go into a quiet river pool (with no waves) feeding into the ocean, he was all over it. But they both ran away from the waves just like little toddlers do. It was too cute! They did love chasing each other in the sand.

The rocky cliffs with their tin and copper mine remnants were a constant visual pull. I never wanted to leave the view of the sea. Fortunately the whole end of the peninsula where we were couldn’t have been more than 10 miles wide. We loved the feeling of being out of time in a slow, dreamy place. Even when it was misting rain, we were out in it. That just added to the dreamlike quality. There we were at the height of the summer holiday period, and we never felt crowded with tourists. The tour buses drove everyone straight down the highway from Penzance to Land’s End, and back. And then on somewhere else. And to think of what they missed by never getting off the main roads. There was a surprisingly high quality local art show in St Just, surfers at Sennen Cove, a circle of standing stones in a farm field a half mile from our cottage, seals in the surf off the beach, dairy cows in stone-walled green pastures, the last working coal-fired beam engine at a mine museum at Pendeen, rain-forest-like greenery and flowers (rhodendrons!) in the deep creek clefts down to the beaches. The best way to explore was by bike, because the one-lane roads bordered by deep hedge-rows weren’t so crazy to navigate as they were by car!

I love the UK for being so dog-friendly. On this trip, the Boyz went right with us into castles, pubs, museums, and beaches! We took memberships in both English Heritage and The National Trust, which between the two of them enable us to get into most of the great places and buildings and sites in England. Here they are going up the little spiral staircase at the Tudor Pendennis Castle. We ended up putting one of us at the top of the stairs and one of us at the bottom, and letting go the leashes! (I have never yet met a young dog that will not RUN stairs!)

On the way home, we stopped at two places that had a lot of personal meaning for me. First, we went to the china clay mines near St. Austell. This is the place where the Kaolin is mined for the bone china that my horses are made from! Kaolin is essential for china clays like porcelain. That was pretty cool to see the “home” of my chinas! Before these deposits were discovered (in the 1700s I think… without looking it up) they could only get it from China. They had a museum there and then you could go up and look at the current pit being mined. A lot differently from the way they used to do it originally:

The last stop of the trip before we left Cornwall, was Tintagel Castle on the north coast. This site, on its dramatic cliffs (though not much castle left), was a place I never dreamed I’d see. It has a big connection with the Arthurian legend, and that is my connection, too. When I was a teen, the first novels of the King Arthur legend I ever read were Mary Stewart’s “Merlin” series: The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, andThe Wicked Day. I have since read many many other versions of the Arthur story, but Stewart’s books remain my favorites. Her descriptions of Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and England of that post-Roman era were entirely responsible for me becoming such and Anglo-phile. One of the most dramatic parts of the story takes place on Tintagel and wow I still can’t believe I stood there. In fact because there is so little in the way of buildings there, you are completely free to imagine your own fantasy about what it might have looked like at the time Arthur supposedly lived. Here are a couple Tintagel photos:

What a way to end such a splendid week! I felt a little sad to think that we probably wouldn’t be back to Cornwall because even with two years here, we have so many other places just in the UK that we want to get to. It truly was nothing like I expected it to be, based on what I read about how popular/busy/overrun a summer holiday destination it is. What I didn’t realize when I booked the cottage by pure luck (and the need for a good location to stay with dogs), was that we chose an area off the beaten path. We were able to feel more like a local than a tourist. The cozy cottage with its bedroom in the loft and the wood stove in the living room was a welcome end to each remarkable day.

Well, onwards! Next week we’re heading to the island of Malta, in the middle of the Mediterranean! (It’s between Sicily and Tunisia on the north coast of the African continent, in case you’re wondering!) We’ll get to check out another place defined by its connection to the sea. Plus immense historical sites! And best of all I think (now that the nights are getting pretty cool here already) Malta should be HOT, hooray!!

I just endured two surreal days because my computer hard drive completely died on Monday afternoon. Totally unrecoverable. If we weren’t near a huge business city like London, I would never have been able to be up and running so fast; I had a new drive installed on Tuesday afternoon and I installed the new operating system and all my files by early Wed morning.

I did lose photos from July and August and parts of my current projects for my magazine client. (I’ll be in re-do mode on those for a few more days.) Fortunately not the Cornwall photos; I had just made a DVD backup of all of them!!

In a bizarre way I’m glad the hard disk finally failed. It has been acting strange ever since we bought it last December (it was a used refurbished), blacking out every so often for no reason. But until now I at least had a way to start it up again. I still love this laptop (Powerbook G4 17″) and intend to keep it as long as I can. I’ve been on the Mac for nearly 20 years with never a failure, so I got complacent about getting a real backup program going. Needless to say we have just got one. No way I’m going through this again, that’s for sure! But I have always been pretty good about saving things to my other disks, otherwise I’m sure I’d have lost a lot more. Plus I had had to backup and copy everything just to come over here. Most everything I needed was on my external backup hard drives or on original install disks.

Tuesday, dealing with the crash, was THE strangest day. I HAD to get a working computer ASAP because I was right in the middle of 4 print jobs with deadlines. (Last resort was going to be to buy a new one!!!) Plus I can’t believe how isolated I feel without the computer as my window on the world and personal data center. I didn’t even know what day it was because I don’t have a paper calendar!

The nearest Apple Store that had an opening to talk to a “Genius” tech person in the morning, was in a town called Milton Keynes. Was about an hour and a half drive north and east of here. So I drove there and they confirmed the hard disk was utterly dead. If I gave it to them it would take at least a week to replace the disk. We were prepared for that answer so while I was driving there, Paul was on his computer at work looking for Mac computer repair and data recovery places. When I called him to say there was no hope of getting anything off the disk, we decided I had to go into central London right away. I called a place he found and if I could get there before 4pm they could replace the disk while I waited!

We worked as an amazing navigation team to get me to London from Milton Keynes. First, to the MK train station. We have this Garmin SatNav portable nagivation device, so all he had to do was give me the postal code of any place I needed to go. I drove to the station and parked and made the train. Was about a half hour train ride to Euston Station on the north end of London. I had to get to the South Bank, across the Thames near London Bridge. While I was on the train, Paul had found a bus right at the station that would take me to the neighborhood of the repair company. That was faster than taking the tube and got me close without walking as much.

I got on the bus and when I got to the stop I typed in the company post code and walked with the SatNav 2 blocks and found the place. I had made it there with an hour to spare! Fortunately the weather was drop-dead-gorgeous so I didn’t have to do all that in the rain. The bus was a London double-decker and I at least got to sit in the top deck and see the scenery. Took my mind off the freak-out problem of the dead computer a little bit.

Then I had to re-trace the whole route and ended up back at Milton Keynes about 5:30pm. I got home to Maidenhead about 7:30, and spent until 1am reinstalling everything to the new computer disk, getting internet back on, etc.

I was fairly tense about doing the whole odyssey by myself in London. But thanks to the wonders of technology, namely the cell phone and the computer and the SatNav, it was perfect. And now I no longer have any inhibitions about taking on central London on my own!!

It sure doesn’t feel like September. Living here seems so outside-of-real-time, that I get a little shock whenever I am reminded about an annual-something going on back home, like the NFL season starting. The leaves are starting to turn here.

Well, back to work. Just to make things more intense, we’re going to Malta in less than 2 weeks! I still plan to post some photos of our week in Cornwall here as soon as I get time. It was just wonderful, what a dreamy place and such a very special holiday!

Today I decided to try casting one of my Optime Arabian stallion sculptures. This sculpture has 29 mold pieces total! There is a separate mold for the main body, each leg, the head, and 2 molds for the tail. At first I thought I had 3 molds just for the tail, but then I realized that the 3rd mold was just for the little piece of mane that flips back on the neck! Here they are in my laundry room-turned Mud Room:

I’m pleased to report that all the parts came out of the mold successfully. This was my first try going it alone (I poured the Caprice at Donna Chaney’s studio). Here’s how the head looks in the mold:

I can’t get over how perfectly and elegantly it casts in the mold!
Here’s a leg:

And here is the big 4-part mold for the body:

All the pieces are now stored in the damp-box awaiting assembly:

Now I have something new to do, on the next rainy day. Which will be tomorrow, ha ha. July was one of the rainiest on record for England, so I am learning to love rain.

Here is a photo of my Art Room. For some reason I am calling it the Art Room rather than the studio, maybe because it really can’t compare to my wonderful work space at home in Boulder. Also, it is utterly stark and impersonal because I don’t have my usual collection of Karen-things sitting all over the place like I do at home. (I’m resisting the temptation to buy little souvenir-y things… but I’ve already started down the slippery slope with a Lilliput Lane model of Windsor Castle! A Must Have, Windsor is our “local” castle after all!!) I should at least get a cork board so that I can stick up photos and things.

Anyway, the room will serve. The house faces northwest so this room is bright all afternoon, when I’m most in the mood to do art work. I can see the street and the park from the pretty window, and watch vintage airplanes go in for a landing at the airport on the other side of our neighborhood. It’s a pleasant place and being upstairs, it should be warmer in winter!

I share the space with the Boyz’ stored kennels and the ironing board. In the spirit of not buying a lot of stuff we’ll have to ship back to the US in 2 years, I cobbled together most of the furniture from discount stores. The aluminum chair is from the patio set that came with the house!

My main dilemma was that I like to stand while sculpting, and want to be able to work at it up at eye level. At home I’d use my peninsula-shaped work counter or the kitchen island if the day was really dark. In this house here I had no work surface I could work around like that. I didn’t want to pay a lot for a real sculptor’s stand. So I bought this tower of shelves from IKEA, and a stool to perch on. The light coming in from the side is great for seeing detail. (Right now I’m claying up a new armature for a new horse sculpture, so I just parked it on the stool.)

I think I’m going to make a big turn in my original plans for my work life while here. It is becoming obvious that doing slip-casting isn’t going to take years to learn, and I don’t need to learn it here for any particular reason. It isn’t practical to get a kiln (and I’m completely burnt out from glazing) so the chances of glazing to finished pieces are slim to none. I should not work the molds here, and then have to get all those made chinas home. Far better to just take the molds home with me in 2 years, and then make china horses from them in the ideal situation of my Colorado studio, with kiln in house, for years to come.

So what I’m going to do instead, is sculpt. I can tell I’m finally ready. I’m seeing horses every day, and the beautiful countryside is so energizing. I can practically feel my artistic spirit lifting up just imagining that I’m seeing some of the same kinds of things that inspired the great old masters who lived here or traveled and worked here. Any new sculptures that I finish here, I can have molds made for ceramics here, too.

Next week we’re off to Land’s End, Cornwall, for a week. We’ve been putting our weekends to good use as tourists, too. We’ve ridden our bikes on an old barge canal near Bath, and around Oxford, and all along the Thames. A couple weekends ago we took a Friday afternoon off and went in to London. The Summer Opening of Buckingham Palace had just started (you can only tour it for these 2 months a year) so we decided to do that. It was pretty impressive and very well done. I was especially excited to see all the great paintings in the Queen’s collection. More Canaletto’s and Rembrant’s to tick off the Seen list! We also went to an art museum called The Wallace Collection. This art museum has the most incredible collection of art and I never heard of the place!! I was thrilled to see this superb equine painting by Landseer, The Arab Tent. (I’m buying a large print of it for my studio at home, to match the Whistlejacket.) And more great Dutch Italianate landscape paintings, my favorites!

Oh, and I’ve found a great doggie-swimming spot on the banks of the Thames, for the Boyz. Kit was in water-dog heaven! Must get back there, next sunny day!

We were to meet up for dinner at an authentic Turkish restaurant in the City with about a dozen of the people who work for Paul, most of them here for the summer from Istanbul, Turkey. They are going to be working in the company’s office in Istanbul that Paul is setting up. They are the most warm, outgoing, delightful people, by the way. We actually have a social life here, thanks to them. They are all in their 20’s and full of fun, and they are regularly having dinners out, or drinks in pubs, or tennis games or other outings as they explore the Brit life while here. (I was sorry to miss the day out learning to play Cricket!!)

Here are photos of our group at the dinner, and Paul sipping his Raki, the favorite Turkish alcoholic beverage!

Raki tastes like licorice, because it has aniseed oil in it. I thought that was a very cool connection… because anise oil is used by traditional chinapainters as a painting medium, and all my chinas that were made for me in England always used to arrive smelling like anise oil! I’ll always connect that fragrance with china horses and England. And now, with Turkish food in London! (And I ate things that night I never dreamed I’d want to eat, and survived! Wow!)

Paul is almost certain to have to spend several weeks in Istanbul this Fall, and the Turks are all ready to play host to us if I come to visit while he is there. If the timing works out, we are probably going to go to a wedding there. I am very excited about being able to see the real local’s Istanbul with someone who knows the place, instead of just using a guidebook. I think being here is going to be such a world-widening and mind-opening experience for us, I feel so very fortunate.

Cheers!

The days have just been flying by, and I haven’t devoted a whole lot of time to the ceramic horse work. But the customized china Caprice is just about ready to be fired. I thought it might be interesting to share my approach to sculpting a new mane and tail on this piece. Below are two photos of the first part of the process:

Not having much of an idea how other artists go about this, I just went ahead and tried the first thing I could think of. I roughly painted-on wet clay slip that was thickened to the point it was gloppy yet held a shape. So you can see it looks like wet clay. For the tail, first I scrunched up the existing tail and reshaped it roughly in the position I wanted, carved it up, and then painted on the gloppy slip. I did this while the horse was “leather hard” which means it is damp and somewhat flexible. Then, I let the whole thing dry out for a week.

After drying out, the piece loses the flexibility but does become carve-able. I like to work on this dried greenware rather than the leather hard, because you can carve it using just a few tools, and soften out what you’ve carved with a paintbrush dipped in water. The whole thing is more rigid and it feels safer for me to handle.

I can see why the sculptors I know who have gone into ceramics, just rave over how wonderful it is to sculpt in the greenware stage. I love it! The best thing is, no electric power tools!! It is such a peaceful, quiet process; just like the original sculpture stage when I’m creating something from scratch in the non-hardening oil clay.

Here’s how the piece looks now, after carving the mane and tail, cleaning up the seams, and adding a lot of little detailing that the original lost in casting… or didn’t have at all. There are more refinements I need to make but it is almost done:

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this fires into bisque. And then I want to cast another horse from the molds and see how far I can push clay changes to create new, unique pieces from the existing sculpture.