Well, I’m back from our trip to our Nation’s Capital, and what a super week it was. I haven’t been there for at least 15 years and we did all the obvious things like tour the White House, Congress/Senate, Supreme Court, and Library of Congress. And all the memorials. My horse-radar perked up at the Civil War Memorial which had gorgeous bronzes:


I took photos of this very nice equestrian U.S. Grant statue, and a close-up of the horses in another sculpture. My new sculpture will have a tucked head (though not this much) so I am collecting shots of heads like this for reference!

The highlight of the trip was two FABULOUS exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art. They had an incredible J.M. W. TURNER exhibition; I couldn’t believe our luck that it opened the week we got there. I am a huge fan of Turner’s work and to see such a large anount of his top work in one place was amazing. We went to the Tate in London last November specifically to see their Turner collection, and I was very disappointed in what was there but didn’t really understand why; we almost had the feeling we were missing something. Now I wonder if this exhibition was already touring because many of the pieces were from the Tate!! I was especially excited to see his watercolor of Tintern Abbey; my all-time favorite especially because the Tintern Abbey bookstore is where I first discovered it and learned about Turner’s work.

The NGA also had an EDWARD HOPPER exhibition, which was also tremendous. I was so excited to see “Night Hawks” in person. I loved all his moody paintings of New York and New England. Now whenever I see a building with strong side-light, I am going to think, “I’m seeing a Hopper moment”. There is just nothing like seeing paintings in person; printed reproductions just don’t have the same power especially in the colors and being able to really look at them both up close and able to step away from it. We were just in heaven. The NGA also has several Vermeers and awesome Canalettos which were a pleasure to see. My first and only love in paintings is realism and landscapes, so I was thrilled to add some great treasures to my “seen” list last week! Oh, and I learned that I love Winslow Homer, too!! I had never really paid attention to his work before.

Here is a link to the NGA’s exhibitions page with links to these 2 exhibitions if you want to look.

I am very glad to be home however, because it was unseasonably hot in DC last week, and the humidity was almost overpowering. We didn’t rent a car and walked, rode the Metro, or bicycled everywhere, and we had to keep dipping into airconditioned places just to get relief.

ANYway, back to the workbench now!
Here is a photo of the palomino Caprice, which was finished right before I left. His happy new owner is Julia Harmon of North Carolina. I sure didn’t want to send him away, Caprice looks simply spendid in palomino!

I have to finish up the War Chant in the next 2 weeks, and then I will be spending more time on sculpture projects in addition to several chinas I will be glazing. OH, and the Mountains got a lovely dusting of snow this week, can snowboarding season be far behind??

I’ve finished the china Meribel in the Belgian dark sorrel, here she is! I wish you could see all the subtle hair texture detailing I painted all over the body. I may try to take better photos tomorrow in natural light.

The Caprice and the War Chant are still in the kiln, more photos tomorrow.

I’ve been busy with some china glazing commissions this past couple weeks, plus squeezed in a whirlwind trip to St. Louis last weekend for the wedding of Paul’s niece. Here’s a photo of us at the reception; we don’t look half-bad for a couple on the downslope of our 40s, I think!

I thought I’d share some photos of the in-progress work which will be finished this week.

First, is a “War Chant” Mustang sculpture by Kathi Bogucki, cast in bone china by Horsing Around. I’m glazing this piece to a sooty dappled buckskin. This photo below shows several firings of the golden buckskin undertones, plus the first airbrushed application of black.
I’m taking this one slowly, because painting solid shaded colors with overglazes means the glaze goes on wet and goes into the kiln wet, so at some point I always get to a place where I need to stop and fire, or I am likely to accidentally bump or touch or smudge someplace with wet paint! I wanted to get the legs painted black before I started on the more detailed areas of dark color like the dappled shoulders and the head.

I’ll post more photos of this horse as it is finished this week.

Below is a lovely palomino Caprice that is almost finished.

Any horse color that has the mane and tail lighter than the body is more difficult. I have to keep those white areas white while airbrushing on the body layers. That means each time I airbrush another layer of color, I have to go back in to the white areas and remove all the overspray color with a damp paintbrush. I need to have places to hold onto the horse while painting (usually the legs). With solid color legs I have to paint the front of the horse, fire it, and then paint the back. I also like to keep the eyes and hooves, etc. white, so that I have a nice pure white “canvas” for those details that I will do last, by hand with a paintbrush rather than the airbrush. This Caprice will have another airbrushed coat on the body to deepen it a bit more, and the it’ll be ready to finish the eyes and hooves.

Here’s a cute dark chestnut Meribel that I am completing this week also:

This one just needs the facial detailing and the hooves painted, to be complete. I will be able to do all that in one painting and firing session. It certainly has been the week for the golden palette of colors, for some reason!

Lastly for today, here is a new tile I just finished glazing:

It is the first time I’ve painted one of my tiles with a dark background. The others have all been left with the natural white porcelain as the background. The nice thing about a colored or dark background is that I can leave white markings on the head and mane/forelock. With a light background, there’s nothing to define the edges of the whites. I loved this look so much that it is now displayed on my studio wall. I plan to do a series of these gradient-background tiles; I have a whole palette of colors to use as the accent color!

This past week has been almost entirely non-productive from an equine art point of view, because my last graphic design client that I held onto when I retired last year has been keeping me busy with their monthly magazine AND a conference program I produce every September.

It’s a cool, grey, and foggy Sunday morning in Colorado, the Broncos game doesn’t start for another hour, so I thought I’d give you a little tour of where I work.

If you were to visit my house, you’d come in the front door, walk straight ahead, and descend down this stairwell into the lower level, to my studio.

It looks like you’re heading down into a dark basement-y place, but surprise! my large and comfortable studio has 2 large banks of south-facing windows! My desk with computer and associated devices is straight ahead as you come in the room, passing the formica counter on the left where I do much of my sculpting and “messy” work. It is L-shaped and the other side of the L has a double sink. Handy for cleaning up the messes.

To the left of the desk is a drafting table where I paint china horses and do other of the less-messy projects. The airbrush compressor is underneath, and I have an exhaust fan in the window. One of these days I’ll invest in a spray booth, but the fan works great for now. South-facing light in Colorado is actually almost too much light as it comes in here all day. In the winter, when the sun is lower in the sky I have to draw the blinds! Our house is designed as an effective passive solar building, with all the major living spaces having large windows facing south east. We rarely have to run the heat in the daytime in winter, if the sun is out!

To the right of the desk is the other part of the room. Right now it has a bed behind the screen. Paul works out of the house too, and we set up his office in one of the bedrooms on the 2nd floor so the spare bed was placed down here. I used to have a nice sofa and loveseat and coffee table in that space, great for when clients came to call. I have my old Mac computer over there and use all the rest of the space for storage and all my pack-ratty collectibles and other Karen-stuff. I keep trying to reduce the amount of Karen-stuff but it just builds right back in!

Here is a bookshelf with my archive of the cast-resin masters of most of my sculptures, plus my personal copies of them.

I have a permanent little photo-backdrop table, which also gets used as a staging area for glaze-painting work in progress. Just a few things awaiting more attention at the moment.

I also have an archive of my sculptures in bone china whiteware in my china cabinet. I keep a copy in bisque and in clear gloss glazed, for posterity. And my precious copies of the Breyer Cleveland Bay model I sculpted, on top!

Here, is Fido The Kiln out in the garage, behind the car, my road bike, and the yard work supplies. The kiln got named Fido because he resides in a dog-pen. Even Kit the actual dog can’t use that pen now! I love having the kiln out there, even though I have to walk my glazed-but-not-fired pieces up the stairs from the studio all the time. I can fire the kiln year-round without getting my studio all hot! Fido now has a pen-buddy, a little ball mill. I just got the ball mill a few days ago (MANY thanks Lesli Kathman for the tip on the resource for ball mills!!!) to grind up my overglaze pigments to hopefully far far far smaller fineness, so that I will be able to achieve a long-sought-after goal of super-fine hand painting details like dappling on the china horses. I haven’t been able to do that to my satisfaction yet, because the chinapaint pigments are too coarse for the fine airbrush work! The ball mill has been churning a test batch for 4 days now. I am holding up new painting on the chinas until I see how the new milled paint comes out this coming week. I am very excited about this.

The last bit of the Where I Work Tour must include a shot of my kitchen. Because sometimes on dark days when the light is poor in my studio, I bring clay sculptures up here and work on the counter in the middle of the kitchen. It has good light from almost all directions most of the time. I can’t guarantee there isn’t clay pushed permanently into that cutting board countertop..!

Thanks for coming on the tour! Any questions, drop me a line.

Next weekend I am making the annual gorgeous drive over the Continental Divide (about an hour west of my house if you were a bird, about 2 and a half hours by car) to Grand Lake, to attend the Peter Stone model horse company’s Rocky Mountain Rendezvous event. Golden aspens trees, elk, moose, and maybe even first snow! Which always starts me mooning over my snowboard…!

Oh, and GO BRONCOS!

Well!

I guess if I am going to have a blog journal, I have to write something.

Starting a blog this month happens to be a good place to begin, because September marks my emergence from a nearly year-long stepping back from sculpture. (At least I hope I am emerging.)

During this time I have been asking myself: Why equine art. Is the focus on my love of the horse enough to sustain me creatively into the future, as it has for more than 10 years now. If I move beyond the horse to other things, would there be a market, and would I even want to do it. I am not interested in contemporary or abstract art; I know I am fully grounded in realism. And animals.

This is all part of a sort of mid-life crisis I’m working through. I retired from my graphic design career in January ’06. At age 48 and no kids, I still have a huge amount of life and time to fill, and the only thing I do know for sure that I have this need to be doing something artistic with my life. This past year was a good experience; to not start anything and take a good hard look around. See what it felt like not to have a horse sculpture on the armature sitting in the studio looking at me. To not have something engaging me artistically in that way, or a new piece completed to look forward to.

What I learned, is that I do miss it. By last month, I was craving to get back to it and almost impatient with all the other things going on (vacations, summer tennis league matches, other work, etc.). I found I had this little running list in the back of my mind, of things I wanted to do in sculpture. Another horse. More tiles. A dog. A dog tile!

I also determined that having the kiln is going to be my lifeline to a happy creative future. I love working with ceramics and glazes and I am going to be expanding my horizons within that realm exclusively. That means no more work cast in resin from me—or at most just a couple pulled from waste molds I will have to make on my clay sculptures anyway. I don’t personally care for the resin material, and I don’t think much of the market for them any more. I might as well produce my work in a media I personally love, especially if the economy is going to be weak!!

I had to find a new resource for casting my existing sculptures in their molds (that were in England), when the previous company was sold. I have got that all sorted out, happily, and now will be able to order those horses again until the molds are played out. Look for newly glazed colors of “Boreas”, “Optime”, “Streetwise”, and “Caprice” to come out starting this fall.

I am getting one of the two Boreas molds sent here from England, and I am going to learn how to slip-cast earthenware in it, so I can make custom unique alterations to the casts. That will be a learning curve of indeterminate length for me, but I am hoping for successful finished pieces in ’08! I also want to sculpt small ceramic items that can be cast by me in simple molds. I hope that the key to staying interested and excited about my work is to have a lot of different things going on and in the kiln at any given time, so I don’t feel stale or stuck on just one thing.

Now, as your “reward” for sticking with me this long, and for even checking out my sparkly new bloggie, is a sneak peek photo of the sculpture I just started today. I have always loved this phase of the canter and is about time I sculpted it. It only represents an afternoon’s work, I’m not sure where I’m going with it, and is far away from being anything much, but I am so pleased to have even felt the desire to start it at all! !

And here is a china “Meribel” that I glazed to this pretty pinto for a customer this past month:

The “Meribel” in bone china is still available to be ordered from Horsing Around of the U.K. (Edition of 50). And I’ll glaze it for you to your color choice, if you want. Just email me for a quote. (You can contact me via my website in my profile.)

Well, thanks for reading, and wish me Bon Voyage as I chart my way through my next creative life stage!