The two horses at the top are Magvandorj showing me the difference between Mongol horses (left) and western horses (right). You can see how we were working on terms for things in both languages also.
On August 14, Oidviin Magvandorj, one of the artists who will be going on the WildArt Mongolia Expedition, came to the National Museum to sit with me in the afternoon while my exhibition was open.
He has a little English and I have a little Mongolian, but as artists we easily kept a running conversation going for almost four hours. I had my MacBook Air with me which has a lot of photos from my past two trips still on it. They were the springboard for these 6×4″ notebook pages, which I decided were too interesting and charning not to share.
Magvandorj was looking at some of my ibex photos from last year when he did the little compositional sketches. The lower left sketch is an example of the type of stylized representations that one sees in ancient Mongolian rock pictographs. He had also asked me about the camera equipment that I use. “neg” is Mongolian for “one”.I had showed him the main reference photo for “Zuniin Odor (Summer Day)” and that led to an illustrated tutorial of the terms for some of the parts of Mongol horse tack, something I’ve been wanting to learn more about.
Susan Fox, American Artist 