Last Saturday I went to a great little local gathering of fellow horse lovers and model horse collectors, and I brought the Clarity clay sculpture with me. Fail or succeed, I have always held that each work is mine alone to puzzle through, and have never sought out critiques from my peers or otherwise. But I do like to put in-progress work out there sometimes to a group of friends like this, and just listen and watch reactions. That is always interesting and useful. Here are some great photos of our day, on Jennifer Buxton’s blog.

I came home from the party with the conviction that Clarity was no longer Clear. The input from those at the party solidified this nagging in the back of my mind that maybe the front didn’t match the back. Soooo, yesterday I spent several hours completely switching the two back legs:

And now after sleeping on it, I changed it back. I did that this morning and it reinforced my basic feeling that this is the pose I want. Too bad because I had a lot of the work done nicely the first time, sigh! But I am glad I went through the process because I think I just had to see it the other way. Usually I can visualize this sort of thing in my head, and I looked at a lot of photos. But this time I just had to do the actual change to feel right about it. I am trying to get the back legs to be a little more dynamic now.

And, I found this photo in my Muybridge Animals In Motion book, that is very close to what I am trying for! I flipped it in PhotoShop to go in the same direction as my sculpture: