(Photographer unknown. Colorization by Kip Mistral.)
What is the story behind this old photograph? Let’s write it together…leave your version in a comment!
How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways…
Recent Posts
Back in the Saddle
(Creme Colored Lipizzan by Johann Georg Hamilton)
Dear Friends, in the last months I have taken a much needed break from blogging and projects in general while deciding on and planning my next steps. A very exciting project I can now announce is a new podcast series, “The Horseman Sessions”, for which I will be the host and interview legendary international modern masters across the disciplines, most of whom are also acclaimed authors. The sessions will have sponsors including Xenophon Press and Trafalgar Square Books and in these talks we will be discussing the perspectives of a true “horseman.”
The first podcast is currently in the studio being edited and I will shortly be announcing the roster of experts we’ll be speaking with and publishing the schedule. I’ve had the great honor of interviewing many luminaries in the past but publishing an interview in the form of a podcast is a new and fun experience for me. I’m looking forward to sharing these inspiring resources with you very soon.
In other news for 2020, I also have plans to publish probably two books and serialize a third work now in progress, and produce a magazine-size compilation of my favorite articles to this point in the form of an ePub, as well as some shorter projects including a couple of creative non-fiction pieces, also as ePubs.
If you have not already done so, please “trot” over to my side bar here on the website to subscribe to my email list. It will soon be activated and the newsletter will finally start rolling.
Moving Sabbatical!
(Costume design for a carrousel of King Louis XIV from the studio of Jean Bérain 1640-1711)
Kipmistral.com is going on a short sabbatical while Kip and Val are moving to Tucson in the beginning of July **AND** expanding the website platform to include regularly scheduled articles, book and video reviews, short film creations, recordings, podcast interviews with today’s classical masters and other persons of the highest calibre of expertise, and new products. If you are not sure that you have joined the email list, please do! Your entry will not be duplicated in the event you have joined previously. I will soon have lots of news for you. Happy Trails for now!
Book Review: “Fragments from the Writings of Max Ritter von Weyrother, Austrian Imperial and Royal Oberbereiter” Vienna 1836
(© Kip Mistral 2019. “Fragments from the Writings of Max Ritter von Weyrother, Austrian Imperial and Royal Oberbereiter,” published by Xenophon Press, 2017. Images and quotations from within are used with permission of the publisher. Image detail from Courbette by Ludwig Koch 1866-1934)
Maximillian Ritter von Weyrother (1783–1833) was Chief Rider of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna from 1813, and Director from 1814 to 1833. And why should we care to read a book of his writing fragments, you might ask. Is he just one more riding master in the cavalcade of horses and riders through time who codified his personal embrace of equestrian art? The answer would be no.
When Only a White Horse Will Do
(© Kip Mistral 2019. Detail from the “Apotheosis of Kaiser Wilhem” by Ferdinand Keller, 1888. National Gallery, Berlin)
Everyone knows, on an archetypal level, that anyone riding a white horse in a movie is a good guy and anyone riding a black horse is a bad guy. Why is that? Why is Pegasus white and why is the Unicorn white? Why is the horse the King rides so often white? Well, white is the color identified with the qualities of purity and nobility, and also it just so happens that real white horses are extremely rare…literally, the pearl of great price.
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