With Marlene Rose in the Studio, Part 7, In Which a Horse Circles Back to the Beginning and We Get Even More Philosophical.

The Horse is in its Stand.

The stand arrives in the Gallery, and for the first time, completed glass meets completed stand. Is the whole greater than the sum of the parts? Is it fine art glass sculpture? It had better be! Or I start again…

I step back and look at the fruits of our labors for the first time. As I circle the piece, my thoughts circle back to the inception of this particular enterprise.

Remember, it all started with my burning passion for these great beasts.

A Decades Dream…

For decades I had wanted to express, in glass, the essence of horse, my delight in their form and physicality and the thousands-year bond we share with this fine animal.

I remembered the images of abstracted prehistoric drawings, I drew into myself the tangible form and feel of a clay plaything and moved all these ideas and images into glass, synthesizing them into something new and ancient, noble and visceral.

The clay begat a hard mold, the mold became a void in the sand, was filled with hot glass, and the heat and the glass and the sand and the color and the sweat and the effort and the care and the love all combined to this moment…

And a Culmination.

Here I see the culmination of ruminations and sweat and figurations and more sweat…for the first time the glass provides an ethereal aura to this shimmering-solid animal, reflection and refraction and shadows and light, light. Light playing on until inevitable night.

Of course, what came out of the sand was quite different than any of its mother-forms! But despite, or because of this, the Horse is itself. It is Horse.

Now in the quiet afterglow of the course of this somewhat raucous evolution, I hope you will join me in the contemplation of this work. I hope you get to feel even the smallest part of my love for these magnificent and eternal creatures…

So many people who have glimpsed the progress of this Horse piece have commented on how it reminds them of a prehistoric cave drawing… This is exactly what I wanted to achieve. Fine art glass sculpture. The ultimate simplicity, and the essence of Horse.