I am holding a little giveaway contest for my faithful blog readers this month as a token of my appreciation and a bit of Holiday Cheer. So here goes:

This is an essay contest!
To be eligible to win one of 3 prizes, you must post in the comments section of this blog post, your answer in 50 words or less, to this question:

What is it about equine art—created specifically in ceramic—that makes it so appealing and desirable to you?

I will be the judge and choose first, second, and third prizes. You MUST sign your full name to your entry in your blog comment, so that I can identify you in order to name the winners! Anonymous comments will not be considered. If your comment goes over 50 words, it will not be judged. 50 words isn’t very many so you will have to really distill your thoughts down to the essence!

The prizes are shown in the photo above. I will custom glaze each of these pieces to the winner’s choice of realistic or art glaze color.
First Place is the Sarah Rose “Hadrian” mini-scale sculpture cast by Pour Horse.
Second Place is the bone china “Boreas” head (which has a hole in the back and can be mounted on a plaque, wall, etc.).
Third Place is the Kristina Lucas Francis mare and foal piece (which can be finished as a pin, magnet, or medallion, etc.).

I will do the glazing work in January.

Deadline for all essays is Friday, December 19th, 12 pm (noon) Mountain Standard Time.

All comments made to this blog posting that contain an essay answer posted by noon that day will be considered. I’ll announce the winners in a blog post on Monday, December 22nd. Posting your essay answer in the comments is the ONLY way to enter this contest. Emails will not be accepted.

I will delete any rude or offensive comments!
I think it will be fun and entertaining to read all the comments… and everyone can read them since they will be public.

I would like to also do a “Readers Choice” award from all the essays where you can all vote/choose the winner, but I can’t come up with another bisque prize! I just don’t have anything else in stock. If I find something cool to give away, I’ll announce that contest addition in another posting.

Thanks and let the writing begin!

I finished glazing the first of the 6 earthenware Optime’s last week. I need to ask my ceramics colleagues whether they think that earthenware china holds details in the bisque casting better than bone china. Because it sure looks like that is the case when I put them side by side! There are little sculptural details in the earthenware I realize I haven’t seen for a long time (that are in my original sculpture) because I’ve only had bone china copies of it for years. I suspect also that Donna Chaney, being an equine sculptor herself, is doing a better, more painstaking job of leaving in or restoring details, etc., when cleaning the castings.

If seen side-by-side, you’ll be able to tell the difference between a bone china and an earthenware Optime, by the whiter whites and smaller size of the bone china. Either way they glaze up beautifully!

OK, now that I’ve had 3 days to wallow in the excitement of moving to England, I have to come back to earth and get to work. And try not to think about what’s coming, because we can’t do a lot about it yet!

I am working finishing up the glazing on 3 chinas this week. All solid colors because of MR. CRANKY, which is what I have named my air compressor. Here is a gorgeous bone china Optime, in solid glossy black!! This was one of those “weeeell, OK…” sort of commissions. Where I wasn’t sure that all-black was going to be all that amazing. But WOW when I got him out of the kiln I couldn’t believe how much I loved the way this sculpture looks. Like it was carved in some sort of precious stone like ebony! This is the last bone china Optime I will be selling. We are making the last 5 of them in earthenware (which are simply stunning by the way).

Next, I have a solid black tobiano Boreas. He has a blue eye. Another really splendid color ordered by a customer, that I thought I wouldn’t be all that excited about!

Glazing chinas isn’t all gorgeous painting and beautiful finished pieces. It’s also a lot of unexciting prep work like spraying on the clear gloss glaze to bisques, so that I can then overglaze them. Here are three in the pretty-in-pink mode. The glaze is pink before firing!

I am happy to report that I picked up MR. CRANKY from the shop today, and he is GOOD TO GO. FINALLY. And now I will be less cranky too, because I can get back on track with work! !

Well, we finally got the news we’ve been awaiting for two months. Paul and I (and the Boyz) are moving to England for two years!! ! !

Paul has accepted and been approved for a job assignment at his company’s (Alcatel-Lucent) offices in Maidenhead, which is outside greater London, west of Windsor. He’s starting January 1st. I’m going there hopefully at the end of May. The Boyz have to go through the 6-months rabies testing period before they can travel, so I have to wait for them. Which is fine, because I have SO much to do to wrap up our affairs here! We’ve had 2 months to contemplate it maybe happening, but now that it IS, it feels a little crazy!

Friends might remember that we went through this exact same scenario in 2000, and then the economy/stock market tanked and the deal never happened. (Though how ironic that the economy is ALSO tanking now!) But this time it’s the real deal. It’s a different job (in fact he’s going to be taking on two jobs) and it’s a much different company, essentially, from what it was then.

Maidenhead has it’s own website, and here is a little photo tour of the town.

For now, I plan to do as much custom glazing I can before May and wrap up most of the promised commissions. Everything else is on hold. I may not be able to do much glazing over there, because I can’t take my kiln and I need ready access to one to efficiently chinapaint the way I do. In fact I may not be able to work (earn income) at all while over there due to tax implications and whether I get a work visa or not.

Needless to say I am VERY thrilled that I will be in the same country as all my existing ceramics molds! If nothing else, I may just spend the year and a half learning how to cast chinas from my molds. My other immediate goal is to finish the Clarity sculpture and cast resins here so that I can take a couple masters with me and have molds made in the UK. Clarity might be the first china sculpture I produce entirely myself from casting to glazing! (I may just not sell anything I make there until I return home.) It’s all a big “we’ll see” at this point of course!

I guess this blog will turn into a journal about what it is like to move and live temporarily overseas. I am sure it will not be fun and easy—at least I’m hoping once I get there the hard part will be over!

Last Saturday I went to a great little local gathering of fellow horse lovers and model horse collectors, and I brought the Clarity clay sculpture with me. Fail or succeed, I have always held that each work is mine alone to puzzle through, and have never sought out critiques from my peers or otherwise. But I do like to put in-progress work out there sometimes to a group of friends like this, and just listen and watch reactions. That is always interesting and useful. Here are some great photos of our day, on Jennifer Buxton’s blog.

I came home from the party with the conviction that Clarity was no longer Clear. The input from those at the party solidified this nagging in the back of my mind that maybe the front didn’t match the back. Soooo, yesterday I spent several hours completely switching the two back legs:

And now after sleeping on it, I changed it back. I did that this morning and it reinforced my basic feeling that this is the pose I want. Too bad because I had a lot of the work done nicely the first time, sigh! But I am glad I went through the process because I think I just had to see it the other way. Usually I can visualize this sort of thing in my head, and I looked at a lot of photos. But this time I just had to do the actual change to feel right about it. I am trying to get the back legs to be a little more dynamic now.

And, I found this photo in my Muybridge Animals In Motion book, that is very close to what I am trying for! I flipped it in PhotoShop to go in the same direction as my sculpture: