The wanting

This is - at its heart - a hobby built on wanting. 

A little girl wants a horse of her own, so her parents buy her a Breyer instead. 

I can't tell you how many times I heard my mom say, "We can't afford to buy her a horse, but she has lots of Breyers!"

For some people, the models are a replacement. They are forgotten when the girl gets the real horse she really wants. For others - myself and most of the people reading this blog included - the models turn into a want of their own.

We fall in love with models not just because they remind us of real horses, but because they are wonderful in their own right. We love the way they look on our shelves and the way they feel in our hands. We obsess over their details, and ultimately, we want more of them.

We want one of each breed, one of each mold, one of each color produced on a mold. 

We want models that look real.

We want models that don't look real.

We want to create models of our own.

All of this is fine, in moderation, but sometimes the wanting gets out of control. 

People spend more money than they can afford. They get angry about what they can't afford. They lash out at others who can afford more. Occasionally, they even fake their own deaths to get out of the problems caused by their wanting.

Also, sometimes they copy other artists' work.

This isn't a problem that started with Takeshi. It's as old as the hobby itself, which is not surprising. After all, we're all a bunch of wanters, and when we see something we like, it's natural to want it for ourselves.

There's been a lot of discussion this week about the differences between inspiration and plagiarism. Some of it has been very heated, and I don't expect that anything I say here to change anyone's mind. So instead of sharing my thoughts on what is fair use vs what is a copy, I want to challenge everyone to take the wanting that we all feel and to do something amazing with it.

Here's an example from Maggie Bennett. She writes: The Horseflies (Markab and Sadalbari) were one hundred percent inspired by Takeshi, in the sense that on the long drive home from BreyerFest 2018, I  spent the whole time thinking, "How can I make something that makes people/myself feel like that?" By the time I got home, I just had to do the actual sculpting. They already existed in my head.

Now, clearly, most of us can't create on the same scale as Maggie, but we can learn to take the sometimes overwhelming feelings of wanting and use them in a positive way. 

It's okay to want things - we all do - but how you deal with wanting things you can't have says a lot about who you are as a person. Do you decide that life is unfair and grow angry and bitter? Do you (try to) recreate the object of our desire, regardless of ethics and civility? Or do you let yourself feel the feelings and use them to guide yourself forward on your own, unique path?

I know which one I choose.