Bring out your CHINAS!

I wrote the original post somewhere over Denver, impressing the hell out of my seat mates on Southwest 829 yesterday, but it apparently posted to an alternate dimension and is no longer available to me. Even the draft is gone!

So I'll recap.

I'm currently tucked into a very swanky resort in San Marcos, CA, very much on east coast time, waiting to start day 2 of the Bring Out Your Chinas Convention. When the concept for the event was announced, I was very excited and HAD to go. Yes, there is a show, but I keep forgetting its there, its so not the focus. What IS here is 4 days of china horse/hobby immersion. Workshops that will take you from sculpting to mold making to glazing, repairs. Lectures on china painting, European ceramics, and photography. And yeah, there is a show that is structurally a bit different than what is typically done, and tempting enough that I packed a dozen china horses (including a half dozen one of a kinds) into a plastic toolbox and flew cross country with them.

When I arrived yesterday, I was picked up at the airport and whisked away to the home of both Joan Berkwitz and Pour Horse, where participants were working on tiny bisque horses that they painted and detailed yesterday. Those horses will get fired this weekend and then go home with their creators. I wish I'd arrived in time to play, too, but there was ample time to visit and eat and hang out and do all that hobby stuff we never quite have the time for at Breyerfest, with its intensely dense schedule.

I am very much looking forward to today's schedule. The resort is gorgeous, and I'll have time to go jog and snag breakfast before the conference part begins today. I really think this sort of thing it where the hobby needs to start pointing itself--relying less on a show that is going to be confusing the the newbie and more on educating ourselves with our own experts who can take the non model world and interpret it to what we want to get done. We, as a group, tend to lean on the crutches provided by real horse activities that we often fail to see that what we do is unique unto itself and not quite like anything else. We should be celebrating this. BOYCC is doing just that.

More as the weekend rolls--I am hoping that I have my mobile set up so I can directly post grainy cell phone pics here as the real ones will have to wait until I get home to download them!

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