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Hello, I discovered the joy of drawing at an early age and as I grew into adulthood my appreciation for artistic craft grew.  I have tried many forms of artistic creation throughout my adult life, from silversmithing to stone sculpting and almost everything in between. Of all the different artistic media I have explored, none fit me so well as the first time I picked up a graver and cut into metal. From that first experience I have thought of myself as an engraver. I think the reason I am most satisfied with the moniker of ‘engraver’ is this. An engraver must be part metal-smith, part alchemist, part artist and part machinist. Any one of these vocations would suit me, but the amalgamation of them all suites me completely. I believe I have horseshoes on the brain more so even than most farriers. I’m not sure why but I guess it has something to do with my own history. Horseshoes have always been a usual fixture in my world. I was raised in the Texas panhandle in cattle country. We ran cattle there on our home place and more years than not while I was a kid, my Dad ran cattle on leased ranches along the Canadian river or in northern New Mexico. So we always had working horses and hence, the trappings that go with them. Decades before the notion of making things from horseshoes became vogue, my Dad, a resourceful and fiercely independent man, used to make all sort of useful and attractive things from the horseshoes discarded around our farm. Dad made everything from coat hangers to boot scrapers from the used shoes of our horses and though function was his primary concern, his horseshoe creations still had a certain grace and beauty about them. Even before that, my heritage was steeped in horses; back to my great, great grandfather even. John Alexander Boney was his name. He was born in 1852. Of course back then there wasn’t a person alive who wasn’t involved with horses on one level or another, but he was a horse trader through and through. In fact, the farm where I was raised and where my folks still live and work is partly comprised of the same land he purchased in 1902 when he first settled in the Texas Panhandle. John Alexander supplied horses to the U.S. Cavalry. So maybe it’s just in my blood or something. I don’t know. Years before I had ever picked up a graver, I had the idea that I wanted to engrave them. I had never seen this done before and I haven’t seen anyone else do what I do to this day. Maybe it was a truly original idea. I like to think so anyway. So I will lay claim to the title of ‘The Original Horseshoe Engraver’. I’ve been engraving horseshoes for a while now and it has been a real adventure. One of my 24K gold inlayed shoes was recently given as a wedding gift in Rome Italy. I think that's the furthest from home any of my work has gone. I think it's kind of paradoxical that one of my horseshoes would be owned by a Roman couple and hanging in their home in the very region where the first horseshoes were first used back in the first century before Christ. When I started out of course, there were no “how to engrave horseshoes” articles anywhere so I sort of made it up as I went along. A lot of the techniques I use to engrave a steel horseshoe are adapted from gun engravers’ techniques and some are borrowed and adapted from Western Brightcut techniques like one finds on buckles and spurs. I use a lot of precious metal inlays in the work I do, but some of my favorite shoes involve nothing more than simply cutting chips of steel. Obviously, my work is heavily influenced by my Western roots but I enjoy utilizing other "Old World" styles as well.
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