Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Dime Store Junk

Dime Store Junk

Not much going on today. One of my students told the headmistress how much he enjoyed the EWW course. That is always good news to hear. The best praise is always unsolicited and from another. The student in question was someone whose outline kept getting better and better.

I am expecting Mark to call soon and we can go out and do some woodcutting. Our project continues on cleaning up the park that was devastated by the windstorm (tornado) last summer. We are about half-way through. It is full of downed pines, broken off tops and leaners. We have hauled out a couple of semi-loads, although we used a flatbed truck to get the job done. Anyway we have enough wood staged where we will be putting up the Wood Processor to give us a couple years’ worth.

My computer table is covered with paints and miniatures that are in various stages of painting. What you do is line them up assembly line fashion and paint them all a single color and then a second and a third. To hold them you take this “Play Dough” like material and stick it on the top of a paint jar and use it to hold the one being painted. The process is turning out better than I expected and I am beginning to experiment painting some other figurines I have.

The two I got on Thursday are what I would call “Museum Quality.” They look like Meissen… that is how beautifully they were rendered. I think they are from the late 1700’s period and are absolutely stunning. My mentor from Kaiserslautern would have been proud. Here I am trying to paint models and I can still find masterful work with that has hundreds of hours of real talent invested. That is why I think I should write a book based upon what Herr Wagoner taught me in how to identify art quality porcelain. I mean think about it, if you look hard you can occasionally find some really high quality, very old work for a song.

The owner of the shop I visited recently has a nice old piece that had been dropped and broken into many pieces. How it could have been so fractured without being beaten with a hammer escapes my imagination. Then the gluing had been done by someone fairly inept and was awful. Still the glory of what it had once been was inescapable and as we examined and talked about it I could see why the owner refused to part with it. First he couldn’t have gotten anything and second nobody would have appreciated it.

I have a number of broken pieces and am tempted to buy some equipment for casting the broken pieces. How hard could that be? There was the guru in New York City who did some work for me and I swear you could not tell the repair…. (Not with 100 blue lights he claimed and I believe him)… Still that is not the point. The point is that it is better to have a broken quality piece that a perfect rendering of dime store junk.