All Diogenes had to do was find an honest man. If he'd been told to squeeze an entire glass casting setup into an 8x8foot space, he'd have chucked the lantern and gone to Disneyland. I know how he feels. So I remodeled the garage and turned it into a working glass casting studio. In this part, I'll talk about why and what problems I needed to solve.
"Hi, Cynthia!" Andrew calls gaily, as he pounds up my driveway, "Can I come in? Wow, cool!" He gazes around my studio with wide eyes, taking in the art hung on the walls, the pendants pinned to the black velvet drape suspended from Oliver Wendell Kiln's gantry, and me, covered in plaster, making a mold. "Grandpa said you were doing some kind of art show and I wanted to see."
"Can I come up and see what you're doing?" I looked out and my across-the-street neighbor, Kim was standing at the foot of the driveway. "Sure," I called, "Come on up." Most of the neighborhood seems to stop in once my garage doors go up and I start working; there's been a LOT of curiosity about what I do in a garage that's obviously no longer a garage. I love the sense of community, although there are times I feel as if I'm working in a goldfish bowl.
"I just love the way you put faeries into all your work. That's what makes it soooo special," she gushed, "I luuuuuuuv faeries." She was looking at "I Dreamt the Jacobean Rose," a sample of tiles I'm pulling together for a prospective client and, frankly, it ain't of a faery. Especially NOT a fashionably flirty flower faery.
The reward for patiently, carefully weighing and mixing and packing frit into little plaster cells, then documenting the result? You get to play with blocks. Those of you who've been to the studio know my obsession with color tests. I once tried to build a full catalog of readily available tints but got discouraged at how long it was taking. So I sat down and figured out how many combinations I should test:
It makes sense, but I'm having trouble believing it: My kiln failed because I left the garage door open. As you might have read, Skooby-my-Skutt bathtub kiln died right at the start of an important pate de verre firing last Saturday. Since I'd bought him a brand new controller not four months ago, I was pretty unhappy about it, and left a flurry of HELP messages with Skutt. "Hmmmm," said Perry-the-Skutt-kilngod when he called this first thing this morning, "I read your message(s) and I've been thinking about what might have gone wrong. Do you have a voltmeter?"
The newly renovated garage studio is starting to look like a weird kiln store; Oliver Wendell Kiln finally joined his brothers in the garage this afternoon (with a great deal of assistance from his chauffeurs). It's taken nine months to get him here so I kinda feel like I gave birth to a giant space heater today.
OK, glassists: What's the first thing we learn when we start working with glass? CAREFULLY LABEL EVERYTHING! Right? Sigh.
I'm learning why sculptors rarely do their own casting; it takes you too far away from the seminal part of things (i.e., sculpting) for far too long. Lately, sculpture seems to be mostly hurry up and go do something else, which is driving me nuts. In an effort to change that, I'm building myself a new studio...which is also delaying things.
Beware of wild impulses. Supposedly they lead to great new opportunities, but every so often they also lead to many strangers tramping through your house.
