Things We Collect

This is a plaster copy of a Ancient Greek Children's Toy Horse. It was a birthday present in San Francisco in 1980 or so. We were out walking about with the stroller and just looking (long ago. I had read about Freud's prediction for desk ornaments in the form of icons of ancient sculpture or iconic archetypes -this is a Jung joke- and that impressed me as cool for some reason.) So this was my first. You can find photos of Freud's desk out there, if anyone is interested. Ir sat on my desk in San Francisco along with my live cat named Herbie (Herbert Gold- SF Writer- wrote "The Man Who Was Not With It" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Gold - as good as anything the Nelson Algren wrote). The horse came to Arizona along with the cat, and then to LA. I lost Herbie in west LA, but this sat on my desk through a divorce and sat alone on in Oakwood. It sat on my desk in Venice and the twins broke it maybe three or four times and I glued it back together and painted its cracks with nail polish. It has become part of a horse collection based on it's size. A friend who became aware of the horse sent me a little bronze horse from Tennessee, and while it remains on important display, it was never comparable size and never quite got the same status. Then in the early 90s after the twins were born and we were earning of money, I discovered this:

This is a Matisse horse. The photo does not do it justice. He sculpted for a little while. The sculptures are amazing. It was expensive at the time, a hundred or so. He sits on my desk now. The rest of the horses are on  the fireplace mantel, except one other that sits out in my studio which was made in India out of scrap metal.
I painted horses in Utah for a short time because I discovered that all of our friends loved having their mounts depicted in oil.