Beginnings - Childhood Art

Where does it all come from, this affinity for art and especially for drawing and painting horses? I dunno! It has been a passion of mine from my earliest childhood. I have always drawn horses! My family were an airforce family that traveled frequently throughout my childhood, and, one of my favorite pastimes was drawing horses, or, reading horse stories, or, pretending to be a horse! Ha! My mother swears I grew hooves on my knees from playing horse all the time - acting out the stories I read. I also had to illustrate all those wonderful horse stories or make up my own characters, and that is what I did...all the time! In my free time, and, when I was supposed to be studying, even my math tests weren't safe and often had little horses drawn in the margins.

Anyhow, I thought it would be fun (and somewhat painful!) to look at some of that old art I did growing up. Most of it was lost due to all the moving we did, but, I found a few gems and thought I would post these in my blog for a laugh! Two today, more when I can dig them up!

This is the earliest I have and is from first grade....

Please note the brand on his butt! This could use a little tweaking in the composition! Haha!

This one jumps foreward a few years to 9th grade. I was 15yrs old and we were living at Upper Heyford AFB in England. I had a great art teacher, Coach Wiley, who gave me the tools, a few tips of how-to and left me alone to do it! I learned from him how to make my own canvases, from cutting the wood to stretching the canvas and gessoing. I created hand-thrown pottery and learned about firing and glazing...and I created this...

"Black Charger" aprox. 12x18" fired clay with black shoe polish and lacquer. I didn't use an armature (what's that?) so, his legs were a bit saggy on the far side. When I fired the clay, however, the whole sculpture blew up in the kiln...guess I missed an air pocket, lol! Anyway, I glued it all back together and the missing parts in the base rockwork actually added to the character of the rocks, luckily! It could not be fired again to use traditional glazes, so, Coach showed me how to use shoe polish and laquer to put a gorgeous irridescent blue-black finish on it.