yla Pearce, of Half Fast Farms Studios, is a farm girl, born in Pennsylvania in 1959. She grew up on the Menzie Dairy draft horse farm in North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Myla's dad trained and drove their six horse hitch. She was closely involved, but felt she had to spend way too many hours polishing harness! The upside of that were the detailed drawings she was able to do of them.
The farm also had five gaited American Saddlebreds, and Myla had two horses of her own that she showed in driving, pleasure and hunters. One was a very special palomino Welsh pony named Queen, who was Myla's best friend till the day she passed on. Queen had been a retired pulling pony. Queen taught Myla so much, including that was that there were many ways to dismount. The other horse was a beautiful flea-bitten gray gaited Arabian cross mare named Specter. She had a ground covering running walk that was just spectacular, and what a delight on trails.
In 1977, Myla went to Indiana University of PA art school, got her BA and rode for the university Equestrian team all four years, then worked as an artist and in art galleries as an art consultant for several years while still riding and showing her horses. She got bored with the Pittsburgh art scene in 1985 and sent herself through farriers school in Wyoming. After that she worked as a horseshoer on ranches and polo fields around Jackson WY, eventually moving to Colorado (Telluride) and worked in art galleries and shoeing horses there. Soon she was shoeing full time and traveled extensively in the four corners region shoeing, training, horse trading, and drawing horses
Myla met her first husband, Tom, in Telluride who had a horse business, and he did big game hunting, sleigh rides and trail rides in summer and had 80 head of horses including 14 drafters. Together they went to many draft horses shows and pulling horse competitions. (Ever see a draft horse run the barrels?) They had two heavy weight horses; their real names were Red and Ted, but Myla named them Rock and Roll for the shows. In 1989 they moved to Colorado Springs. Myla started her own hunter jumper boarding and training business called Hunter Haven along with shoeing, and still worked at an art gallery in town until 1992 when she went full time with breeding her Friesian and Clydesdale stallions for dressage horses. They opened Half Fast Farms in 1994, breeding and training Thoroughbred race horses and Myla shoeing, training, boarding, etc etc.
In 2000, she retired from shoeing horses as she was developing rotator cuff problems in my right shoulder so she started customizing model horses for sale. Myla had collected models since she was 8 years old and when she got online in 1994 and found out about all the shows and customizing she thought she wanted to do that some day. Myla started painting models as a hobby in 1995. By the time she had to retire from shoeing she had a complete model horse customizing area in her studio and realized that the time was "now".
Myla lost Tom in an accident in August of 2002. She sold the farm and the horses except for her Friesian stallion Hans, and moved to a southern mountain town in Oklahoma, where she was able to concentrate on sher work as a model artist full time for three years until she moved to Pennsylvania to be closer to her parents. Myla was painting models and made her first foray itno sculpting.
It is her belief that it has taken every bit of where she has been, the horses and people she has met along the way and the intense desire to share all of it that gives her the drive to create these unique pieces. Each model she create commemorates them all in some small way.
Studio website.
Half Fast Farms list which is for updates and sales of her work
Top: Name unknown, Red roan mustang stallion customized from the Kathi Bogucki War Chant resin.
Bottom: Konfedi: black leopard appaloosa Knabstrap, customized from the Linda York Camaro resin. Harness by Susan Bensema Young.
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