A Visit with Kelly Weimer, Part I

On December 2 my husband and I had the great privilege of visiting with Kelly Korber Weimer and seeing her famous collection.  Ever since I'd first caught glimpses of this magnificent assembly (on FB, through zooms and elsewhere), I had privately yearned to see it in person.  That seemed impossible, despite the fact that she lived less than 3 hours away and in the same state.

Yet everything had come together.  That day the weather was decent (always a consideration).  My navigator husband wanted to get out of the house and go far away, but not have to worry about hunters.  Unspoken but real, we had finally reached the stage of being able to trust small numbers of friends indoors not to infect us, (so this is a covid emergence story).  On top of it all, I had the best excuse:  I had a horse to deliver.  And so it was settled.

In the basement of an ordinary-looking house is one of the wonders of the model horse world.  Kelly kindly let me blaze away.  My aim from the start was not so much documenting every beast, (which I felt was an impossibility), but to grasp their overall arrangement and layout.  How did the rooms (if they were rooms), fit into one another?   I wanted to keep their general outline in mind, which might help keep me from getting totally drunk and lost.  This was a skill I'd gained at BreyerFest over many years.

But there was a lot to get drunk on.  Be warned:  these 2 posts have a total of 64 pictures.

Starting in the basement, there were a couple of normal rooms, including this photography stage area.

The entrance to the mysteries is to the right of this.  Turning a corner, one sees a pair of doorways, and through them shelves can be seen going on to the end.  Left doorway:

And right.  The right hallway is intercepted by a cross corridor that leads to a side chamber, a space opening off the right side of a hall running parallel to the main hallway.  Even that corridor is lined with horses.

Here's a view straight into the side chamber, a place with some furnace ducts.  This room held miscellanea on 3 sides:  horses that were not Breyers, one of a kinds, overflows and extras (i.e. new molds) or those who did not fit into the general order.  That order, I realized, was congas.  The horses are arranged by mold.  Pretty much every shot was a conga shot.

I will be showing this chamber and another, far more formal, upstairs room in a second post.  For now, just going down those hallways was enough and more than enough for sensory overload.  I confess that no logical order was used while shooting.  I just grabbed!  (Any order you see here came along afterwards, a product of post-processing.)  

Right off the bat, at lower right through the left doorway, I found my current desired horse, a white foal.  Kelly wouldn't part with it, imagine that!

Then my progress became a sort of amazed swinging right and left, and just went on and on.  On the right:

On the left:

 The aisle or hallway that led to the side chamber resulted in some shelves being corner units.  I thought this very clever.  See the Emersonii above (10th photo) - they are below the Vermeers here.

Naturally, shorter horses took places on shorter shelves.  High on the right:  Shetland Ponies.

 Further on down this same lengthy aisle, the process repeated itself.  What? only one Alborozo?

(Above) The blue Lonesome Glory is a repaint.  (Below) Ahah, here is the mother of the foal I wanted, standing with others of her shape (Corazon, or Celeste:  Andalusian Mare).

Clearly a collection as large as this one has been years, decades, in the making.  I never did get a head count but it must be in the thousands.  For contrast, my own collection, over nearly the same span of time, tops out at about four hundred, not counting SMs.

Deeper and deeper into the mysterious depths.  The chestnut PAS on the end is by Kathy Maestas, and was found in an antique shop.

The zebras were on a cross corridor corner. 

At last, at the ends of the earth, I saw the back wall.   These two shots give the atmosphere of the place pretty well.

With a wide brim hat, a long tail and a camera around my neck, I had to be careful how I turned around.  At first I kept muttering, "I didn't know it would be this small."  I meant the space they all were in -- I felt they deserved a great deal of room.   Memories from the Patagonia Museum of the Horse in AZ n the 1970s, and, further back, winding through the tourist alleys of Nogales, Mexico, were in my brain.  This was before I realized there was an entire room on the first floor with a lot more horses.

And when I did, the first thing I said was, "So that's where the other Alborozos are!"  She laughed out loud.