Monday, May 25, 2015

Desert Dust



My needle threader broke before I could add more flowers

There's more to the story of this embroidery project, but for now I will only confess to trying to replicate the 70 year old photograph by Verne Wood of a wild horse in Wyoming. For a model I actually used a oil painting someone did of the photograph so this embroidery project is even further removed from the original. I also moved the horse, a Palomino Stallion named Desert Dust, about 1200 miles south and made him a Mare. Desert Dust was indeed captured during the wild horse round up, a' la the 1961 Henry Miller/John Huston movie The Misfits which killed Clark Gable and also Marilyn Monroe. This photo was of the horse's last few moments of freedom. It became a rodeo horse and tried to stomp to death anyone who rode it. But it was never free again. Desert Dust was reportedly murdered in captivity in 1952 but reckless and unsustainable wild horse entrapment and slaughter came to be regulated. There's actually more to the story than that but to delve deeper would be like turning Desert Dust into dog food.

The horse came out a little fat and the color shades were beyond the limitation of a corner store selection of yarn. And those flowers aren't native to Wyoming. I was adding more flowers when the needle threader broke. Alas, it wasn't the only thing that broke.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the first part of the journey
I was looking at all the life
there were plants and birds and rocks and things
You see I've been through the desert
on a horse with no name.
Sorry folks the desert is closed.
The horse out front should've told you.
Hope you find your oasis. JACKASS.
YOU'VE HUMILILATED MY HUMAN DECENCY.
"Time flowing like a river" Alan Parsons Project.

Oggy Bleacher said...

I was originally on a horse with no name, but eventually I gave him a name and he coughed up blood before stumbling off a cliff. My project is a tribute to him and my heart which was lost in a shady ravine.
There's a clock ticking at the end of the road but I'm heading the other direction.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.