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Originally Posted by Sharon Knettell
Garth,
You mean that terrific sculpture no longer exists. What happened?
As to my lapsed subscription. I was running out of shelf space and just let it run out. I think I will resubscribe now.
I stopped my American Artist magazine subscription when they put Thomas Kinkade on the cover and started featuring his column.
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Dear Sharon,
It was exciting and exhilarating to be at the middle of that high visibility sculpture production between 1988 and 1991. The sculpture I generated had enough scholarship credibility to garner quite a bit of publicity and press in those years. In 1992 this Horse was cast in Fiberglas, and exhibited worldwide. I don't know where this cast is hidden now. Capt. Dent wished on his deathbed in 1994 for me to see the project to completion as the sculptor. However, the Leonardo's Horse, Inc., Board of Directors had other plans and engaged another artist with a bigger name than mine in 1996, who completely revised the Horse away from Capt. Dent's aesthetics and vision to a very modern and stylized horse that was unveiled at a racetrack outside Milan, Italy in 1999. Meanwhile that same Board let the original sculpture disintegrate to the point where it had to be tossed into the dumpster literally! I guess this is the end of the story. The moral I would like to pass on is to all here is to never create anything as an artist under a "Work for Hire" agreement. That is almost always bad news. I had zero rights to what I sculpted for three years of my life!
While I never actually signed any "Work for Hire" type agreement or any contract while sculpting this Horse, it was considered work for hire because this sculpture was commenced a year prior to the Berne Convention in 1989, which revolutionized artist's copyrights and moral rights on a world wide basis. From 1989 to the present, an artist automatically has the copyright in all his/her creations unless the artist specifically signs in a written agreement that the work in question is a work for hire. Works created prior to 1989 may have no such copyright protections. Something to think about!
Below is the Horse I sculpted in May, 1991:
Garth