In a different dream (art, redux)

This was the desk portion of an old oak school chair desk, it was on my cousins’ porch in Nicasio, but someone drove a pickup right through the porch 4th of July, 2019, destroying it and the front of the house, and this is what I salvaged of the chair. 

This was the entire piece. The back of the chair too. I also had the rungs too, but they got separated from the rest. I repurposed it with chalkboard paint and pastel. I gave it a dream of a lake and a mountain. When my cousin moved everything out of the house for repairs, this piece got damaged along the way, the chalk image brushed off, so I reapplied it, but now it’s a different dream. Since the peace no longer exists with its other parts, is it a new piece or an old piece?

I offered back of the chair with the horses on it to Geoffrey Davis but he never replied. What is significant about the Paleolithic horses is that they were pacers, most horses trot diagonally but amblers, or pacers move both legs on the same side.  The only other horses that do that naturally are Neolithic horses, such as the Icelandic ponies (which have some Irish lineage) and the archaic horses of the British Isles including the Kerry bog pony, Dartmoor, and the Exmoor pony. The extinct tarpan would be related. Can’t use the word breed, here as it predates the concept. I wrote more on Kiger mustang pacers here.

I made this Angel assemblage from the rest of the old oak chair, and other detritus from the yard. it lived outside the Nicasio house like a guardian angel until the contractors finally came to repair the house last year. Now it solely exists as a photograph. It rests on a piece of sheetrock from the 1940s. It was one of the walls that was smashed in. When the contractors discovered that it was made with asbestos, the entire house got tagged and bagged for hazardous substances. The beginning of the end of the Nicasio house.

I write in order to learn—what I am currently interested in—and I never know what will catch fire. Suspect my dyslexia has a lot to do with my eclectic interests. But I must admit anything to do with horses has my unabiding attention—weird ideas come to me and then I follow them. See where they will lead. Most of these convoluted essays stem from Facebook comments. I write one thing, and then discover something related, and so on. And then it won’t let go of me. I am possessed once I am in the throes of writing  Most people just roll their eyes at this stuff.

Few folks know that Petaluma was once the hotbed of racing trotters. I think the famous stallion Kenilworth was a trotter. Not sure if he was a pacer. That information is hard to track down unless there’s an action photo. There were also famous trotting/pacing thoroughbreds, not just Standardbreds, and I remember reading that one famous racehorse who was a pacer, can’t remember who I have to go look that up. Like Healdsburg’s Black Ruby, the world’s fastest mule at the trot. So the larger question begs, was she a trotter or a pacer? Inquiring minds want to know.