Been a busy two weeks (please regard this as an oblique apology for not posting in awhile…), focusing on websites, glass, new (marketing) work, glass, old and new friends, glass and…glass.

Was honored by the presence of two really wonderful artists, Mel and Les “Twinvision” Rowe-Israelson, last week and this. They’re in town to focus on building some reasonably massive glass sculptures, meeting up with the rest of the glass community and…BECon.

BECon, Bullseye’s glass artist conference, is this week. The conference focuses on educating glass artists along a particular theme, with some of the best kilnforming artists and engineers in the business. I confess, however, that I learn just as much networking with fellow glassists as I do listening to the speakers, and I also have a lot of fun.

This year’s theme is kiln glass in architecture, an increasingly popular topic, with a strong focus on ways to effectively scale up and install glassworks. Since I keep wandering into that sort of thing myself, I’m hoping to learn a lot. (More on that as the conference gets into full swing.)

In the meantime, I’ve been getting a huge education in casting glass from the twins, and learning a whole lot just watching Les build one of her signature pieces in wax. As an experiment, we’re also videotaping Les as she works–I’m hoping we’ll get a nice “how to build a mid-sized kiln-cast glass sculpture” video out of it.

Les has inspired me to revisit HostaBowl, one of my Emergents pieces, and slightly modify some techniques. She’s also been helping with two other Emergents, DogwoodMan and HostaFading, which will show up on the blog someday soon. She’s attacked my large-scale wax phobia with a missionary zeal, and I’ve gone so far as to succumb and buy some of that hated Victory Brown wax to give it a shot.

For me, BECon is starting with color–I’m in a three-day workshop with Dr. Harold Linton of George Mason University on 3D color theory and practice. We’re doing small-scale boards with ColorAid paper, building 3D models to test color combinations and playing around with color mapping. Somewhere in the back of my head I’m wondering why we can’t just do this stuff on the computer–it would be MUCH, much faster than gluing colored paper to foamboard–but Dr. Linton’s helping me put reason behind some of my color dilemmas. Neat stuff.

More (much more) to come…