Designs For Good

Teaching Weaving, Dripping, Pressing, Carving, Drawing, & Texturizing

2011-01-24T12:16:00.000-08:00

This will be a multi-part post on what has turned into a marathon glass fusing class. I have to admit to an unorthodox approach to teaching. The basic approach is to give a broad overview of the technical basics, have them work small for a few weeks, then do a scaled down version of a final project, then finally do to the finale project. This might be doable in a six week course except that I also let them choose their own projects however grand or unassuming their aspirations may be. That's where the complications set in, and also I feel, where the most important learning occurs through encouraging and tempering as the case may be.

It is a challenge to say the least having a group of students all going their own direction on projects which vary from just a few dollars and one firing to several hundred dollars with complex techniques and multistage firings. I have to learn as much as they do - about their skill level, their ability to attend to detail, their ability to plan, and more important decipher what their sense of aesthetics are and how I might help them express that in glass. All of that can't be done in six weeks. After 10 weeks you might if you're lucky begin to understand the student enough to help them take their first tentative steps on their glass journey.

The image above illustrates what is called kiln carving. Impressions are made in glass by cutting designs into ceramic fiber paper which can range in thickness depending on how deep of an impression you desire. Glass is laid on top of the cut outs, and as the kiln heats the glass flows like honey into and around the cut outs. In the example you can see both an impression into the glass on the right and a relief on the surface of the glass on the left. This is accomplished by using both the 'positive' cut out shape, and also saving the 'negative' space/hole left in the ceramic paper from the cut out. The glass flows down into the negative spaces while it also flows over and around the positive cut outs.

I typically include a glass weaving project (image above) early in the course, because glass cutting skills are exercised by cutting a lot of thin strips of glass. Bending glass is learned as well as seeing how molds are made and used. I also learn each student's color preferences, and I get a sense of their dexterity level. It also helps them over their fear of glass which everyone has initially.

In my last class I had them create their own colored glass by sifting glass power onto clear glass. The idea is to get them use to taking full control over their color choices by creating their own color gradations and mixes. It is too easy and somewhat uncreative just to buy your glass, cut it up, and fuse it. I call this the 'cut and paste' approach which quite literally a child can do. Of course, cut and paste is ubiquitous in glass fusing and can lead to some very impressive results. However, realizing that you can and should attempt to control every element of design is one of the important steps leading from craft to art. As good as this idea might have been, their 'customized' glass was much harder to cut than the off-the-shelf stuff, and we had to start over.

I like to think of stock glass as simply the materials to build an image. Going beyond cut and paste is a key part of my personal aesthetic, and I think a teacher is always going to bias their students one way or another. The dripping project is a very good example of how to move well beyond cut and paste. The image to the left is a stack of cut up glass. It is setting on top of a stainless steel grate. When heated it flows through the grate forming a wholly new mix of glass. Any number of other techniques could then be applied to this mix as a starting point for other projects. I simply presented the idea to the class in an unbiased manner ( it is something I aways wanted to try) along with many other project options, and two students chose to explore dripping (to my pleasure).

A related technique to dripping would be raking. When the glass is still molten you can use a metal rake to drag through the glass forming color patterns in the glass with the rake's fingers. I'm glad that they didn't press me to do that technique. Reaching into a 1600 degree kiln is.... well, not really advisable, but people often do put their mark, so to speak, in glass by raking.

To end the first installment of this series of posts is an example of an exercise in texture and line. It takes several years, if not a lifetime, to explore the elements of design (line, shape, form, texture, color, pattern, etc). Eventually, an artist settles in on a certain style, and that style can be broken down and seen by how they use the elements of design in a composition adhering to sound design principles.

In the image below the exploration of line and texture was the focus of the project. The student was inspired by a picture of a glass project that had line drawings created by tracing through sifted glass powder. Several attempts were made to capture that style.. The bold red rings were created using glass paste, the blue line scribbles were done using a Sgraffito approach which is simply tracing lines through powder with a stick. The faint red circles on the left were created by pushing a round object into powder, creating impressions in the powder.

There are also three distinct textures of glossy, mat and sandy which adds a tactile dimension. As a line and texture study this piece was a huge learning adventure. It also helped the student realize the importance of working small so that ideas can be tested quickly at reduced cost. Glass is terribly expensive, in many ways unforgiving, and requires a capacity for delayed gratification. It can been weeks, and all too often months, before what seemed a simple technique is mastered. Projects often need multiple firings and you can't see the results for 24 hours or more. The learning feedback loop is sometimes extended beyond the student's capacity to wait for a result, and understandably so.

In my glass adventures I have to admit I've been frustrated more often than gratified, mostly because I wanted glass to do something that may be better approached in another medium. My goal as a teacher is to reduce the frustration level for students while at the same time not boring them with small exercises. This is one of many balancing acts that makes a good teacher, and the more I learn the easier the journey will be for all.

New Directions & Old Via Train

2011-01-16T19:18:00.000-08:00

Things are finally setting down after a visit with my mother in Pittsburgh who is still recovering from surgery. My mother-in-law passed away in November and on top of that I had been working two full time jobs. It was a crazy four months, but I couldn't pass up the consulting money, and of course, I couldn't cancel my classes. I'm not the best juggler of time, but I managed. The worst of it was driving to a stained glass class, then realizing I didn't have any glass cutters with me! Thank god for your local True Value!

Anyway... The train gives you a lot of time to think and relax, and it was a very relaxing trip. Not only was I on a journey to Pittsburgh, but I also formally began my journey with enameling. I spent most of my time studying from magazines and books. I'm attracted to the media by the type of detailing it offers which glass fusing does not. I'm already envisioning large fused glass panels with enameled details added.

This is going to be an involved creative journey. Enameling is in many respects more complex than glass fusing, because of the addition of metalsmithing. It will take several years of exploring before I create something substantial. There are a lot of skills, tools, and materials to master. It will be a perfect complement to fusing, expanding my visual vocabulary immensely. I've been working with copper in my fusing panels and mica along with gold and silver in my torchwork. Enameling will enable me to create detailed work with metal and glass which has so far eluded me. The closest I've come is the detail found in my Metal Marbles which are created by adding gold, silver, copper, and raw oxides while torchworking glass.

The image above is from a coal energy plant outside of Chicago - beautiful poison going into the air 24/7. I thought I might stop off at the Art Institute during my Chicago layover, but it was just too cold to be running around. Besides I had my camera and with so little time I'd rather create my own images.

Union Station was my target. It was a great overcast day and the aged glass ceiling gave me the perfect lighting conditions. Well, kind of. My lenses aren't the fastest so I had to shoot with ISOs above 3200. On my Nikon D2x they have low light settings called H1 and H2 which are somewhere around ISO 6400 or so. The images are typically very noisy and not useful for much, but I ran the files through Topaz DeNoise and it creates something usable for the type of look I'm after. Other Topaz filters smooth out the images even further in the process of abstracting them. Union Station was a nice diversion for the couple of hours that I had between trains. I could probably shoot that building for several days.

Heading to Pittsburgh has always been like a journey into the past. Jean and I have lived in Minnesota for over twenty years, and I really haven't continually lived in Pittsburgh since the seventies. During the trip however I focused a lot on the future, because we have recently decided to move from Minnesota. The hours passed and the train gently rocked and swayed as thoughts of starting someplace anew mingled with images of glass designs.

While in Pittsburgh I spent some time with my niece who is starting her first semester in college. She's not sure what to major in and I can relate to that, because I'm not exactly sure what skills will match up with what opportunity for me when we move. I hope to solidify something, but I'm also OK with moving and letting circumstances take me down a totally new path.

It's kind of like being a freshmen again. I might even go back to school. Not so much for another degree though. One thing for sure I will will not be able to do the Have Kiln Will Travel escapades. We are planning to move to a small community which because of its size would not support that type of teaching adventure. I currently teach in over 30 different adult programs and art centers.

I would like to get involved on some level teaching glass, but I'm not sure what the format will be. Teaching took over my life in the last year. Designing and refining classes replaced the goals I set out for Designs For Good. But that's OK. The last year has given me a solid new skill. How it will be applied I'll leave open for now.

The image above was shot in the old US Steel building downtown Pittsburgh. Like the reflection of me I feel neither here nor there. The past is past and the future undefined, and that's exciting.

West View Park Revisted

2011-01-08T22:26:00.000-08:00

I haven't been home to Pittsburgh in a number of years and will be taking a train there next week. At the same time Jean and I are thinking of moving, and I have been going through a lot of belongings that I don't intend to relocate with. I came across some old black and white film shots taken in the seventies of West View amusement park in Pittsburgh before they tore it down. This park was the site of our yearly school picnic, and was loved by everyone. All things must pass as they say, and the park couldn't keep up with changing times. Folks back home might like to reminisce about the park so I'll print these out and take them on my trip.

The picture above is the main hill of The Dips. A creaky-clanky ride that inched up the steep hill seemingly taking forever to get to the top. Once at the top there was a brief moment where you were on top of the world, then only to have the bajeebus scared out of you on the down slop. The down slop was actually deeper than can be seen in the picture.

If I'm remembering correctly you just put a leather seat belt on and the hand rails you see above swung back to basically keep you in your seat. Of course if you were brave you wouldn't hold onto the hand rail. You would then get tossed about in the seat and smash into the person sitting next to you from the force of the turns.

The ride was definitely of another era. You can see the manual breaking lever to the left in the picture above and the break linkage. For me it looks Victorian or what is now called Steampunk.

The shot above is the entry point to The Dips. I remember my first time waiting in line to get on the ride. I was hoping they would close for lunch before I got there. It was agonizing waiting and waiting and I just didn't want to be there. I couldn't leave for fear of being laughed at. So I chose the less of two fears and stayed in line. It wasn't bad... if you don't mind the feeling of your stomach floating out of your body.... or something like that.

The park itself was around a mile or so long carved out of a valley. Originally there was a lake/swap area that The Dips went around and on top of as it meandered its way back to its debarking point. The swap was eventually filled in to make way for more rides, but the park just didn't have the space to keep up with the million dollar rides that were becoming vogue at other parks.

The shot above shows The Dips in the background and The Haunted House on the right. You can also see the Alpine Ride towers on the left and the arcades in the center of the picture.

Then there was The Racing Whipit! It had some dips but was really known for a lot of sharp turns and for speed. Two sets of cars 'raced' to get to the end. You could actually shout 'losers' to the people in the other set of cars when the cars ran along side by side.... as though you really had any control over who was going to 'win' the race to the end.

The image above shows the overgrown vegetation on the bottom of the track. The park had been abandoned for several years when I took these pictures. You could walk all of the place and do just about anything you wanted. I guess it was impossible to fence it all off. Remarkably I don't recall seeing any vandalism, graffiti or other signs of abuse. I'm sure some items were stolen.

In the shot below you can see the two sets of cars poised for the next race that never happened, and the track's hair pin turns in the background.

I used Photoshop and Topaz plugins to colorize and abstract the images. I love Topaz. It enables infinite control to adjust any image to any feeling I want to create.

The Power Of Craig's List

2010-12-05T16:28:00.000-08:00

Over twenty five years ago I started my glass journey doing stained glass when glass fusing was pretty much unheard of. I took a community education course in the copper foil method and made a sun catcher. I then embarked on my first project, and oddly enough I didn't do the copper foil approach. I always over build and over do things. I guess I was afraid to build a 25 by 40 inch panel using copper foil, and chose brass lined came for the bottom and zinc H channel for the top.

Not knowing very much as far as proper technique I hand cut each one of those polygons individually. There are easier ways of course. I didn't have a came saw and all the zinc for the polygons was hand cut on a little wooden miter box. The project design jumped onto my sketch book one day. I'm not sure what I was thinking about, but I liked the design and I was determined to finish the execution.... even if it killed me. The brass lined lead came was a challenge, because it wasn't very flexible and I wanted a very free flowing pattern on the bottom. Because I over build things I didn't want regular came which would have been more flexible and WAY easier to cut.

I ended up calling the piece SpaceTime. The name came as an after thought after the design was on paper.

Anyway... it was a good experience. I made two more stained glass panels of my own design and then found glass fusing.

After having it around for all those years it was time for it to find a home. If we are going to be moving then I'm going to need to find a home for a lot of my stuff. I placed an add on Craig's List and just a few days later I got an email asking about it. Yea sure... I thought to myself. Some joker from China or Russia wants me to get involved in some rip off scheme. The query turned out to be genuine and it sold several days later. The new owner is very happy with it and had it mounted in a window as seen above. It is a night shot. The bottom glass is actually clear.

So maybe I'll do some more marketing for the stuff out in my studio. I got tons of stuff that needs to find a home.

Fall Reflections

2010-10-31T18:10:00.000-07:00

Fall always brings on a sense of melancholy for me. The ending of summer and in Minnesota the beginning of a frozen landscape. Colorless for the most part and uninviting. I always thought that I might get into cross country skiing just to get outside and active during the winter months, but that never happened. In the past I spent all of my free time in my studio doing glass projects and enjoying the heat generated by the kilns and torch.

Not sure about this year. I don't have any major projects in mind and I've been so busy the last few months that I don't have an area of exploration in mind either. I quit my IT job over a year ago and recently got called back to do some consulting work. It is hard to say no to consulting wages so I accepted their invitation. And as a consequence I have been teaching in the evenings and working days as an Oracle database administrator. Thank god that 50% of my community education class have been canceling. Otherwise I would be working 16 hour days continuously.

All of that makes me long for my Vermilion vacation that was just a few weeks ago. It seems a long time ago already sitting on the sun drenched dock, enjoying my beer and taking the picture posted above. My IT work will only last a short time, and I can then go back to concentrating on my teaching and various artistic adventures.

I think this year I may start up my crucible kiln and make more spheres, but this time their destination will be to become paperweights, because I don't plan on creating another sculpture series for them to become a part of.

Other concerns however are causing many in my family to reflect on more important issues. Both my mother and mother-in-law have been seriously ill. Thoughts of moving to a small town, career changes, some of us thinking of retirement etc., are now intertwined with daily living. There is no definite plan for change as of yet, but change will come.

Teaching has been a wonderful experience, and had I been mature enough to realize it when attending Carnegie-Mellon's art program I would have made teaching a career option. Right now teaching at local art centers is the best I can do. It has been personally rewarding, but financially not so much. Going back for a masters now and then hoping to land a good position would be a huge investment that I'm not prepared to make at my age and position in life.

Working with nonprofits which was the initial focus of this blog (Designs For Good) became secondary to teaching which became a full time adventure. Moving forward I would like to rework that initial focus back into what I do... but there is that word 'moving'. When we relocate that will change everything.

Color & Texture On Vacation

2010-10-04T07:11:00.000-07:00

When you've found which of the elements of design (color, form, shape, texture, line, pattern, etc) are central to you it may be confirmed just by looking at your past work. I'm always looking to make sure I'm on the right path and not just on some deviation or momentary tangent. Before I spend years studying something I want to be sure it is worth the effort and central to what I am innately sensitive to... what truly resonates with me.

In my Introduction To Glass Fusing class I go over the elements of design and ask the students to think about which of them they feel comfortable with and might enjoy exploring. I often use line as an example, because we can easily think of line alone as being boring. Who would spend years just studying line, is the type of question I often get. Then I mention engravers and their eyes perk up. There is a world (and a lifetime) of exploration in each of the elements of design. Being sure you are on the right path saves you from a lot of wasted effort.

This point came across to me this year with our yearly vacation up to the north county of Lake Vermilion Minnesota. What a wonder world of color and texture. Texture always abounds in the sticks, but in the fall the full glory of color is flaunted about like a peacock in heat.

I can recall last year spending the week just studying texture during my photo sessions, and now that makes sense to me a year later, confirming by more recent commitment to color and texture. There does seem to be an ongoing sensitivity and preoccupation with those elements of design.

These digital art images can show some level of texture, but it is not until you see them at full size (16x24 or so) that you actually see the real texturing done via digital processing. Several post back I talked about this in my Psychedelic Jello post.

The colors were at their peak this year during our visit so I had both color and texture to work with in abundance. The reds where stunning in the maples. Yes, of course I always push the saturation in my work, but the reds you see are really not that far from natural. It was nearly a psychedelic landscape at times.

I also have begun using polarizing filters a lot. In the past I hated to use them because they make a slow lens even slower. Now that I'm doing strictly digital art and not photography there is no problem with setting the ISO to 800 and sometimes higher. The small amount of noise is lost or corrected during digital processing.

Levels of abstraction is also a consistent theme in my work. The more levels there are the more interesting it becomes to me. Choosing the point of view on the subject is the first level. I like to shoot at unusual angles and often lay on the ground with a 12 mm lens. The wide lens is the second level of abstraction since it is an unnatural point of view.

Next fall I may take a balloon ride in the MN bluff country and shoot from the top-down POV. That will yield some really interesting work, but it might also be really expensive. Not only for the ride, but I may also need a fast and long lens in the 200 to 400 mm range. Fast and long lenses are costly.

Good composition is always important no matter the type of shot. My cropping and layout is fairly typical using the rule of thirds, framing, leading lines and many other conventions.

Building the contrast of the image both in tone and hue is the next layer of abstraction. I like my images with a controlled amount of highlights and deep shadow, giving an image a greater sense of depth than it may have actually had. Contrasting hues in another technique for building a sense of depth. Split toning by hue is a contrast technique of making shadows colder than normal (blue or violet tinted) and highlights warmer (orange or yellow tinted), yielding a visual sense that might otherwise be much flatter.

Pushing the color saturation (plus or minus) is my next level of abstraction, and at the same time looking for increases to the natural level of recorded texture. Texture exists on multiple levels. Firstly, on the highest level there is purely a psychological sense of texture in the scene via its interpretative texture. We see leaves and water and know they are different textures.

On the next level there is a texture in how the image is constructed. Pointillism, impasto, and engraving are three totally different approaches to building an image. The digital process I use breaks an image into areas of patterns and lines on a very small scale. Optionally, there could be no lines or thicker lines which bound larger or smaller areas. The detail and type of abstraction of the original photo is very controllable and there are infinite aesthetic choices.

In the print world there is the substrate itself which adds yet another layer of texture.Today there are many optional output surfaces for digital art, including canvas. I'm currently in the process of deciding on my substrate for the next series, but it probably won't be canvas.

I'm not sure where I stand yet on the 'photo looking like art' discussions. I'm not a photographer, but I use a camera. I'm not a painter, but I like to abstract my images. I don't want my digital art to look like a painting or a photograph. The images above do tend towards looking photographic, that is, until you look closer and it becomes clear something else is going on, and much more interesting. On the other hand if I abstract them a lot, then they will look like a photo trying to be a painting.

I should probably just ignore the discussion and do just what I like doing.

More images in this series can be seen at this slide-show. More will be added in the next week or so. A few of those will then be candidates for the next stage of abstractions consisting of: compositing, blurring, smudging, masking, adding painted areas, etc. Because it is time consuming, only a few will be chosen for the next stage. This will result in images where every square inch has been through the aesthetic mill and polished to my liking. My liking for the day of printing at least, because the path forward always makes past efforts... well, passe after all.

Handmade Tile Association

2010-09-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

My teaching adventures at Have Kiln Will Travel have taken up a lot of my time over the last six months. I'm beginning refocus on the commercial and home decor side of things as of late.

I've joined the Handmade Tile Association who are "a diverse group of independent members and volunteers, including: handmade tile and mosaic artists, tile historians, tile setters, tile showrooms and galleries, tile organizations, material suppliers, educators, design services, and tile related fields all across the United States".

My ad in the yearly directory will feature of one of my room dividers (seen below). I hope to have time in the coming months to focus more on glass art for home decor and larger commission work.

The association's web site is a good resource for interior designers and for those who are looking for something special - something to take a project to the next level and the right artisans to do the job. Check it out! You can see a selection of my tiles at the tile gallery on my web site. The gallery shows only a few of the possible designs, colors and textures. I can achive any home decor objective and design style.

Edible Landscape - Pyschedelic Jello

2010-08-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

I recall being in a gallery eavesdropping in on a conversation between two collectors. The one was describing her favorite painting style where the paint is put on so think that it looks like pudding. In the case of the landscape above it reminds me of psychedelic Jello. For one, the water is doing all kinds of rippling in two different directions like a large platter of Jello would do. Then there are the crazy saturated colors not found in nature, but strangely enough in some of the food we eat.

As I've been discussing, I think for once the subject didn't get in the way of color exploration. I find myself often staying too loyal to the original, whereby it acts as some sort of constraint which I constantly measure my efforts against. It's a crutch I need to free myself from.

In this landscape study from a Lake Vermilion photo, I put texture explorations in the back seat and focused more fully on color as I pushed the saturation sliders further than I ever did before. That and some vodka produced colors that I wanted to dive into. Wouldn't it be absolutely crazy if there was a place you could go to for a short visit where the world was colored like this landscape. Of course we couldn't live there, because our eyes would burn out from over sensation.

Maybe that is what a painting is for?.... no.. not to burn our eyes out, but a place to go to for a short visit.

I love how the grass and shoreline turned out. There is enough texture there to keep me from feeling the need for more throughout as was done in the petunia study a few posts back. Both the Topaz Simplify and Clean plug-ins where used multiple times on different layers, along with Photoshop layer masks and other layer adjustments. When you click on the image the enlargement will be close to what the final 20x30 print will look like.

I don't think going psychedelic will work with many subjects so maybe the lesson learned is that I need to choose subjects which 'allow' me to be as nonrepresentational as I want to.

Scott County Art Crawl - Oct 9th

2010-08-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

I'll be participating in the first ever Scott County Art Crawl. Read all about it and see some of the work at http://bit.ly/bRQ7Dh.

Come by for a feast for the eyes, mind and tummy... I'll have great beer, wine and hors d'oeuvres.
You can preview a lot of my work at http://JimBolesDesigns.com.

DIRECTIONS

4640 139th St. W.

Savage, MN 55378

952 388 3762

Once you found your way to county road 42 (Egan Drive) running east and west through Burnsville/Savage/Prior Lake you can use these directions.

If heading EAST on county road 42 away from Prior Lake, do a U-turn at the Sonic restaurant (the Joppa-Glendale intersection with a traffic light), and head west on 42. Take the first right turn lane (Natchez) after U-turning at the Joppa-Glendale intersection. The Natchez turn comes up quick. Then take the 2^nd right (139^th St). The studio is a brown building with a white door and trellis in the front, and is to the right of the white brick ranch-style house at 4640 139th St.

If heading WEST on county road 42 from Burnsville take the first right turn lane (Natchez) after passing the Joppa-Glendale intersection (has a traffic light). Then take the 2^nd right (139^th St). The studio is a brown building with a white door and trellis in the front, and is to the right of the white brick ranch-style house at 4640 139th St.

From downtown savage (Savage Art Studios) take 123rd east to Lynn Ave. Take a right on Lynn and continue on Lynn (which becomes Glendale) until to come to county road 42 (Egan Drive). Follow the directions for WEST listed above.

Here are several maps. The top map shows the location of my studio and you can zoom around to get a large view. The lower maps show the locations of the Savage Art Studios, my studio, and the studio of Chuck Burton another local glass artist.

Pseudo Triptych

2010-08-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

The wonders of Photoshop.
Needed to see what three of my digital art pieces would look like together. So why not make a digital display of my digital art... digital lighting and all. Couldn't resist using a heavily textured digital wall to go along with my recent texture posts.

Abstraction Distraction

2010-08-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

One of my ongoing themes as of late is determining just what level of abstraction I'm comfortable with in the process of downplaying illustrative or representational imagery. The image above is a macro shot of a white rose. Just the tips of some petals are in focus, and some softening was added too. This image is almost the opposite of what I have been exploring. There is almost no color and texture, and maybe that is why it intrigued me. Softness is a texture, and the warmness and softness together would make a nice background for a cosmetic ad or some such.

Having nearly no detail I put the image into the Topaz Adjust filter just to see what would happen. I choose all the controls to bring as much detail into the image as possible and created this sandstone-like interpretation of the rose. Of course this is the other extreme being all about texture now.

I didn't want to totally lose the softness so a mixture of both is what I went for in the image below. A little bit of Photoshop layer combinations, masks, and other adjustments resulted in this dark dreamy landscape. Kind of nightmarish I think and far removed from the original clichéd cosmetic ad background.

Funny what will be created if you just let impulses guide you. I'm attracted to this image, but afraid of it too on some level. I certainly wouldn't want to turn into another HR Giger. A nice diversion at this point. If more of these dark specters appear I'll have to pray to Monet to save me.

Color & Texture Part Two

2010-08-13T18:17:00.000-07:00

I put away my pastels. I was making a real mess of my studio with pastel powder flying everywhere leaving a layer of dust thick enough to write your name. At $5 a stick there has to a cheaper way to experiment with color so I'm back to Photoshop.

The image to the left is a study of color contrasts. It's was hard to keep the screaming yellow in the background. It wanted to jump forward and overtake the subject, but in this case the strongly silhouetted petunias do seem to stand firm against the yellow onslaught. It helps that I down-keyed the yellow to yellow-orange somewhat (do you remember 'Screaming Yellow Zonkers'?).

Equally important for me is visual texture which is not visible in these reduced size images. In the enlargement to the left I'm please by the harmony and balance of color. The more you enlarge a section of the image the more abstract it becomes. The interplay of shape and positive and negative spaces begin to replace 'flowers' as the subject, and that too pleases me since I don't like the portrayal of a 'thing' getting in the way of the color and texture which is the true subject.

In this next enlargement the texture of the 'painting' begins to appear especially if you click on the image to enlarge it further. It is only at this point that I begin to feel comfortable with the work. I spent a lot of time getting the digital brushes and filters to produce this naturalistic texturing. I actually spent more time working the texture than composing and coloring the image. The image started as a photo. The yellow in the background is a field of Black-eyed Susans. I couldn't resist the color contrast with the petunias and had to stop to shot them. Shooting at a high ISO begins the process of abstraction along with a shallow depth of field which creates a yellow backdrop for the purple flowers. The graininess of the ISO setting is the underlying 'cause' of the texture that I develop further with my digital tools.

The finish print will be 20x30 and the full detail of the texture will become evident as the viewer moves increasingly closer. The final image below is closer to the desired overall style. In future work I need to further abstract the coincidental subject (flowers) to bring the actual subject (color and texture) more to the fore even when viewed from a distance. I may finally be pleased with the overall style once the coincidental subject has been subjugated (so to speak) by the actual subject.

Color & Texture

2010-07-05T19:51:00.000-07:00

I suppose that my interest in the use of glass powders isn't just about color. When I decided to fire my glass to a maximum temperature of 1210 degrees Fahrenheit I discovered I could mix glass powder to any tone, tint or hue without the problem of certain color combinations turning brown. Typically, many warm and cold glass colors when mixed together do not yield a color in between, but instead you get brown. That's because under heat the chemical make up (metal oxides) in glass react with each other. Since the glass granules (fine powder) do not get a chance to chemically interact as 1210, you can actually mix glass powder like you would paint.

Just as important to me I recently realized, is that this temperature also gives a very fine sand-like texture to the glass surface. I like this, because if glass melts together into a completely glossy surface you lose a lot of detail, detail that is necessary if you want the finished work to gain interest as you approach it. Also since most glass artist work very hot and want the gloss look, my textured surface serves as a counterpoint to that general tendency. I like that it is soft looking and inviting. You want to touch it not because it is glass, but because its texture is inviting, something new for the senses. It is really just an expensive sand painting to put it crudely, but because of the intensity of the color and the irregularity of texture, and the design of course, it can be a much more as seen in the April 2009 blog post.

The image above was accomplished with glass chalks and regular glass frit. The glass chalks come in stick form just like normal chalks. The intensity of the warm colors is due to the fact that the chalks are more in the enamel family that glass powder. One of the main characteristics of enamels is that they are heavily pigmented. Just a dusting of an enamel coating is required for opacity and richness versus around 1/8 inch or more of glass powder to create the same opacity and richness. Because of this the chalks enable a leap into visual color mixing that is impossible with glass powders. From a distance the small specs of enamel visually mix and as you approach you begin to see individual specs. It is the small size of the spec coupled with its intensity that enables the visual color mixing even when very close to the piece. You have to be closer than a couple of feet before you begin to see the richness in detail, detail that invites you in even closer.

The image above is of a 5x5 inch square, and is probably slightly enlarged on your screen.

To create this texture cover your glass with #1 frit. Bake it to around 1210 and hold for 10-30 minutes depending on your kiln. Do not allow the frit to round over, otherwise you will lose the 'tooth' necessary for the chalk in the next step. You now has a 'canvas' to work on. The sharp edges of the frit act as a texture like pastel paper has, cutting into the chalk and holding the chalk to the surface of the glass. Do your design on the textured surface. When your drawing is complete, bake to 1450 until most of the chalk has melted into the glass surface.

Regretfully, the chalk does not act like glass and you cannot achieve a sandy surface. Most of the finished work will be glossy though somewhat textured, albeit mostly rounded over texture and not very sandy. Since you have to fire so high the regular glass frit which was your 'tooth' will also be melted into a mostly glossy surface. That's OK though since the micro fine pieces of chalk still do show up as fine distinct pieces of color and do not melt into a amorphous blend.

I'm sure to use this technique on a future powder painting.

Powder Painting Steps In Creation

2010-06-21T18:37:00.000-07:00

The link below is to a PDF file which shows the steps during the creation of one of my powder paintings. For this commission the goal was to create a fertile mountain valley scene. Some of the technical challenges were:

The panel had to start at 1/4 inch thick to withstand shipping, and an approximate size of 32 by 19 inches
Because of the thickness and overall dimensions long firing schedules were required which made it a several week process to work through all the phases of the painting.
I wanted a lot of actual texture in the powder to give a feeling of a mountainous landscape. This resulted in increasing the thickness of the panel in some sections and making annealing the glass more of a challenge. Special care must be taken when a glass panel has varying cross sectional thicknesses.
Multiple firings were required to build the texture, while also guarding against the powder turning to glass. Once glass powders turn to glass there are chemical reactions which can 'discolor' the work.
Hue shifts had to be planned and balanced with each new layer and firing, because each firing made the underlying layers darker and glassier

In the image above the final stage of the painting is in the kiln and a closeup was taken of the main peak. After 5 firings the peak was standing about 3/8 inch high on top of the 1/4 inch glass. The valley is shown towards the top of the image. I've never work this thick with powder, but was increasingly intrigued by building up layers of powder, then carving into them. My sculptural tenancies were getting the best of me.

The PDF is around 2 meg in size and may automatically jump to full screen mode when you open it. If it does, then to leave full screen mode just hit the Escape key. When viewing the sideshow click on any image to advance to the next slide. The color, as always, will vary from monitor to monitor.

Hope you enjoy the sideshow!

Here is the PDF.

Glass Powder Painting : Part Two

2010-06-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

This is the scene of the battle ground. At least that is what it seems sometimes. Over forty jars of glass powders, various sorts of sifters, brushes, other make shift application tools, and the ever faithful kneeling pad. For this exercise I pulled in my vacuum - a little hand held unit in the upper left which was sold at Radio Shack for vacuuming keyboards and computer parts. You can see the texturing at the bottom of this painting done with the vac and brushers. Kind of like impasto painting, but in my case I've learned that it means that I'm just taking things too far.That is, it just really isn't my style. The thickness of the powder is just lay after layer of indecisiveness. It is nice to know that an impasto-like approach is possible, but that is not what I'm after.

This adventure was a battle to get closer to finding my style. You can clearly see the carving effect in the image to the left. The more I worked on this piece, making it increasingly representational, the less I liked it. The image was getting in the way. I found myself studying how to create the illusion of waves trees etc and totally lost focus on color.

This image got dumped in a jar. About 2 and 1/2 pounds of powder which I'm sure I'll use for some experimental purpose some day.

It is too easy to lose contact with why you are doing this in the first place, and for me that is simply the celebration of color. Part of a growing nuisance is that Bullseye is making more and more striker colors. That is, until the glass is fired it just looks whitish which makes seeing the color in your painting impossible. It's like painting blind. I use my fired color swatches (in the top left of the top image) to guide me, but you just can't interact with colors on your 'canvas' if they go on white.

To the left is the 'canvas' after I dumped the image. The painting surface has been texturized by kilnforming it on lava cloth which is a commercial cloth-like product used in the furnace and kiln building industry as a flexible refractory material. When you fuse onto it you pick up the texture of the material, making your glass look like a canvas surface. My reason for doing it was to create a rough surface so I could try out glass chalk sticks. I believe ceramists have had these glazing sticks for some time which apply on a rough surface like chalk would. However, during my testing the lava cloth surface wasn't fine toothed enough. You need something like a sandblasted surface. But hey! Why not use a white powder fired to the regular powder painting texture. That would be a great surface. I'll have to try that.

The canvas has a integral copper/gold frame. The frame was kiln carved at the same time as the lava cloth was used to create the working surface. So, you have an integrated frame and working surface done in one firing. How cool is that!

So now back to work. Color... pure color.

I love the sensation have having a field of color then dropping in spots of its complement/opposite. Somehow the sensation is exciting. I can't explain it. You have this perfect field of cool blues, violets, and lavenders, then PLOP... you drop fiery orange right into it. My eye goes POP. Then you drop in more. Then add a few drops of yellow, and yellow-green in a way Pollock would be proud.

But that is sooo odd to me. I can recall how I laughed contemptuously during my freshman year at the abstract expressionist. I thought it was pure nonsense.... and that is what it is. It isn't logical right brain realism. I use to worship highly refined drawings, but now run as quickly as possible from any trace of a subject. I just want the kinetic and visual experience unhampered by thought. Just me in motion and responding, and most definitely not illusionary representationalism.

So then... what to do about scale? Yes, I can make little 2x3 foot powder paintings, and what a collection of unimpressive nonsense they would be. Can I really make 8x24 foot glass powder paintings? Yes, of course, but at what cost. Where would I store them. Would any gallery want to display a 500 pound painting - glass is heavy after all? Should I just do regular paintings.... not sure, but I don't think so.

This will require some thought.

Is this really just an exercise in absurdity. As defined at Wikipedia "Aburdism - a philosophy born of existentialism, regarding the philosophical concept of "the Absurd," the clash between the human tendency to seek some inherent meaning in the universe and the human impossibility of finding any".

In my case... to strip everything down, to find the most essential source of motivation, to then engage it as purely as one can, then only to realize that the motivation leads nowhere.

Perhaps when I laughed at Pollock all those years ago it was really not contempt, but rather I unknowingly recognized the absurdity of a painter (and of painting) having gone too far. Pure expression over composition and thought, stimulus-response over calculated technique, sensation over reason.

Am I searching for a middle ground, or, am I beginning to lose faith and will resort to our clinging need of a representational subject?

I am probably taking all this way too seriously.

In the end I trust laughter and play. Does my work make me smile or frown, lighten my spirit or lay it low with incessant investigations and self examination?

I trust that I don't want a subject, but I don't yet know the form I am seeking.

Is color enough?

Glass Powder Painting : Part One

2010-05-17T20:30:00.000-07:00

In my Designing With Glass class I attempt to relate the classic elements of design (point, line, form, shape, color, texture, etc) to the elements of glass (frit, stringer, slumping, cutting, paste, etc). In a recent class a student told me that she was a shape and color person. This is a very significant step on the journey of locating yourself on the pathway of self expression, because exploring just one element can be endless. Engravers play with line for their whole career. Rothko's color fields were based on the elimination of almost all of the elements of design save color, and he spent all of his final years exploring the raw experience of color.

Being able to identify which elements are central for you enables you to focus on those who have forged the path ahead of you, and who have spent their life's energy focused on a particular use and subset of the elements of design.

I'm not as brave as Rothko yet. I still need some sense of form, a recognizable subject. Color and color alone as the subject may be where I end up, but I'm not there yet. In the above digital abstraction from a photo the obvious subject is the tree.The abstraction process started by shooting very close to the ground with a wide angle zoom set to around 13mm. The image at the right is the original. I wanted to work with blue and yellow and it is a simple Photoshop process to change the colors. A little Topaz filter plug in magic and there you have it... digital art. (Art or not is a totally different topic)

This spring I visited Minnesota's Bluff Country in the southeast corner of the state along the Mississippi. I've been studying landscapes and have a high regard for the landscape painter Wolf Kahn. The landscape for me is my 'excuse' to lay down fields of color. I've noticed that the more form (the illusion of three dimensional shapes) I bring into an image the less it resonates with me. The same is true for the line, shape, texture and the rest. For me, all of the elements of design must become subservient to color. Wolf Kahn comes close, but he has a predominate formal subject too often, and a lot of his paintings seem muddy IMHO.

I went to the bluff country to find rolling vistas, but found that sitting high in the hills on scenic overlooks gives such a removed, distant and impersonal feeling. I needed to get into the landscape, be part of it, and not aloft looking down. I traveled to the Amish country of southwest Wisconsin and found more suitable locations within the rolling hills and valleys. One creek valley in particular was strikingly pastoral, even otherworldly as though I had just transported myself into the English country side. These hidden acres nestled in a gentle rolling valley provided a quality of light and shade, sound and echo, and misty coolness totally opposite of the American farms up on the treeless and sun bleached hill tops - farms stripped of every form of variation in the relentless pursuit of agricultural efficacy.

There have been romantic painters of landscapes of course, but I seldom personally experienced for myself what they might have chosen as a subject worthy of portrayal. We can too easily romanticize the Amish life style, even make it ionic, and in some sense make it unreal and removed from our sense of reality. But here they were before me, living in their world hidden, but yet in plan site for the few who would venture onto this dusty and uneven gravel back road.

Driving very slowly I drank it all in. I saw small boys playing baseball with comical over sized mitts covering their hands. They were dressed in the typical light blue shirts, straw hats and black pants which made their mitt covered hands all the more conspicuous. An outfielder waved to me as I drifted past slowly. A school bell tolled only twice, breaking the aural calm momentarily. Children ran towards an unpainted weather worn school house as the bell's chime reverberated and faded into a valley being reborn in these those first days of spring.

I parked my car just to sit and take it in. I couldn't believe that these people lived here, actually passed their lives day by day in such a place of simple beauty. A horse and buggy approached, but was still a long way off as the sound of hooves against the gravel road preceded it. I dared not stare at them as they passed. This is their place, their country, and I did not want to intrude any more than what I already had.

There was only one small road that traveled through this hidden valley. A petite but vibrant creek danced and curved along the roadside. Its gurgling intermixed with the distant echo of a shrill cardinal, nearby chatter of wren song, and the gentle repetitive cooing of morning doves on a branch over my head. Cows roamed and grazed freely in naturally manicured pastures of unattended mixed green vegetation. One bent to drink from the cool clear creek water, making a bull frog leap into the water, ceasing its deep throated mating call. How remarkably different I thought as compared to how the cows lived just several miles away on American farms of mud pens, filthy trough water, and year old dry hay flung about on the baron dirt for them to eat.

I don't think I could ever compress how I felt in that valley into a painting. The experience made me realize that some sort of subject in a painting may be a necessity in order to illicit from the viewer any feeling even remotely like what I felt in that place. Could color alone ever do it without a formal subject?

I took my digital art and made a 36x30 pastel of it in preparation of doing it in glass (see above). The title of this piece is Approaching Autumn Storm. My personal aesthetic tends towards abstracting things to there simplest form. Having a formal subject, as much as I like one, is a crutch for me at this point. I repeatedly choose compositions with a formal subject and I'm repeatedly dissatisfied with the result. This pastel confirmed my feelings. After completing it I have no desire to continue onto glass.

Many of Wolf Kahn's paintings achieve, in my view, the balance I am seeking between a pure color study and a painting with a recognizable subject. The subject serves to accent what is already there without it, that is, fields of color. The subject is a modifier, an enhancement of the underlying color study which is actually is the true subject.

The photo for this digital art piece (above) was taken in the Amish valley. Looking at Kahn's work as a guide I should be able to abstract this further into pure color fields then lay in the trees in a very loose manner so to not overtake what is for me the true subject - a joyous feast of color.

So, now onto the next exercise.

One Year Anniversary : The Meanng of Life

2010-05-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

It is not quite a year since I quit my day job and just slightly more than a year since this blog was started. Many of my friends, so they say, are envious of my leaving work, but we all are too well aware of the hazards of not being steadily employed. All in all it has been a smart move, the bank account is still dwindling, but there is steady income albeit a fraction of my IT salary. This Fall maybe a bit overwhelming with teaching engagements almost every day of the week including weekends.

My Designs For Good adventures have changed direction over time. Initially when I was still employed and the bank account was fat, I gave products and services away because that was what I wanted to do, I could afford to do so, and it was good marketing. Over time as I began to expect and need some kind of compensation in return the direction of Designs For Good began to change.

Have Kiln Will Travel was my solution for a sustainable way of using my talents to provide my income while helping nonprofit and charitable organizations raise funds. The fused glass event/class which is the basis of HKWT has been very successful, more so than I ever thought. My greatest surprise however has been how much I enjoy teaching, and how it feels a natural thing for me to do.

My life long measure of what activities are appropriate for me has been very simple... Does the activity drain me or give me energy. Funny... I remember very early in life how I learned this guiding principle. At the end of summer kids get tired and bored in the autumn heat. Having played their hearts out over the summer the various games just don't seem exciting anymore. I recall sitting in the yard with some friends, and I began to pull out my matchbox car collection which we would regularly play with for long hours in our imaginary city of made up businesses and adventures. My friends looked at me with disapproval and said they just didn't want to play with the cars. My reply, having seen this in myself more than once was - if we just start playing then it will BECOME fun. After playing for ten minutes or so one of them looked up at me and said... hey, you were right!

Watching the ebb and flow of energy in my life has made me what I am. I react to it as it directs my actions. I believe that this sensitivity to one's rise, fall, and realignment of energy is the answer to the age old question of (and hopefully not sounding pretentious) the meaning of life. There are many spiraling deeper meanings and levels to what I just said, but on the most basic level.... if you just start playing.... it will become fun.

Of course having fun isn't the measure of all things. Life is more complex than that. However, the sensitivity to and your ability to be guided by your energy flow is an ever deepening connection between who you are and your potentiality. That is, your ability to become something richer than you are now by bending your will to the energy that you are, and can more completely embody. Hmmmm... Embody is a very appropriate word here.

HKWT has not been wildly successful in fund raising thus far. I have only started that journey however, a journey that will require me to seek out and to work with governing boards of the organizations which I want to help. What HKWT has done - to me - has changed my direction entirely.

When I quit my job I was toying with a half dozen ideas. Photography was one of them. I love picture making and could sit endlessly playing with my digital darkroom. I did nonprofit work by shooting events and providing free prints, my time, and helping with marketing. However, because I was looking for a sustainable relationship many of my ideas didn't pan out once I actually started working on them. You can give things away endlessly, or, what I should say is.... professionally you can't give things away endlessly, and in the end those you work with must value your work, and yes, compensate you for it.

But that's the rub for everyone isn't it. How do you do what you enjoy and get paid for it?

There is no magic formula of course, and the path will look different for everyone. That is why so few find, and more importantly, stay on the path. No one, save yourself, can direct you. The refinement and balance of your energy with the realities of your life is the magic, and a trick you must relearn and perform every day of your life.

I've never been a morning person, and maybe will never be, but lately I've been playing with and somewhat succeeding at getting up early. Why bother? The answer is that the quality of my alertness and sense o f well being is enhanced if I get to bed earlier and don't stay up late drinking beer and watching reruns. It is a calculated trade off. I enjoy staying up latter and totally unwinding from the day, but that has to be compared to the quality of being in the morning when I get to be earlier. Right now, I'm siding with getting to bed early. Every event, task, and interaction presents an opportunity for realignment.

I still don't know where I'm going, and that's a good thing. For now, I have refinements to make for HKWT, and because of that path I am now becoming a very good teacher.... so they are telling me. I have hopes of being able to pay the bills here forward, and look forward to wider horizons as I mature on this new path. I will remain vigilant towards the necessity of meeting the bills and then growing back my savings.... but dare I say that is only a goal, and not a directing principle which has control of my life.

Strictly from the fun point of view, aka where my highest energy level and excitement is.... I have started a series of glass powder paintings which will be the most grand works I've done so far... at least in my mind's eye, because thus far they have not 'gone to glass' yet. The digital art studies for these can be seen at my main web site. I'm still in process of abstracting the photos. They will become richer in color and more dramatic as I play with the sense of light and color contrasts. I will then take them to full scale pastels, then finally to glass.

Maybe these will open new doors, new departures points, or, maybe they too well be a completion and resolution. It is hard to say until they too have become embodied as their energy embodies me.

Happy Trails To You!

Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center Fundraiser

2010-04-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

The Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center, the hottest art center in the Twin Cities, is holding a gala event to raise funds in preparation of its opening. Here are some details below. For the full story visit the site at http://fireartscenter.blogspot.com.

We're delighted to announce our next big event, "A Fundraiser to Remember," which will take place on April 22, from 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis.

This is one fundraiser that promises to live up to its name! We’re honored to have two critically acclaimed—and entirely unique—local musical acts lending their incredible talents in support of CAFAC: Jazz vocalist Charmin Michelle and Cajun Country musician Kevin Anthony & The Twin City Playboys. We're also proud to present the world premiere of the short documentary about how CAFAC got started.

Art 101 : Stimulus-Response

2010-04-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

So I have to wonder... why don't I just paint on glass with stains, enamels and the growing list of new products which enable you to paint on glass just about the same way as you would on a canvas? I don't have a good clear reason for this. I made an arbitrary decision early on that I would use only glass, then inclusions such as copper and mica became acceptable, but I never explored glass paints. Arbitrary boundaries forced me to prob deep into a limited set of options versus a broad ranging 'media of the month' approach, but they weren't really arbitrary boundaries as it turns out.

Over the last year I have been exploring all sorts of glass media options since I will be teaching and there are a lot of fun things out there such as Glassline Fusing Paint, the products by Unique Glass and many many more. These are fun to play with from the design point of view and expand one's tool chest, but they just don't click for me in my personal work - they don't resonate. They seem more in line with the decorative arts. I'm sure I'll find time to explore their potential more fully at a future point.

This sense of resonance - a sense of appropriateness, a drive to explore, and most importantly an ongoing interplay between the stimulus (the media) and a response to it - is a sort of dialog that occurs and matures over time. That dialog doesn't develop for many media options and types, and for an unknown reason. Does anyone really understand why they prefer one color over an other? Not really. Something resonates or it doesn't. Why do I love glass, but feel compelled to control it's innate showiness? I don't know.

Very odd, but very significant. Where do ideas, preferences, and directions come from? I think some people appear more creative than others only because they are better responders to that which resonates within them. The creative person is simply responding, resonating with an interior stimulus-response dialog. Strange and wonderful things come from this singular dedication to internal resonance.

Anyone can have a favorite color (stimulus), but the creative person responds by playing with it, exploring the dimensions of hue, tone, shade, and tint. Anyone can do simple mathematical problems or crossword puzzles, but it is the creative person that begins to use words in new ways after having explored their attraction to words and becomes compelled for unknown reasons to write literature.

Perhaps what an artists is is a person who has decided to take the path of exploring an internal aesthetic resonance in a very dedicated manner. And perhaps that is also why artists are a bit odd too. To base your life on something as unpredictable as some sort of internal resonance as a life's guide is a bit...well, undirected. After all, I cannot tell you why I like certain colors, why I prefer one texture over another, one media over another, one direction over another. I can say in so many superlatives my 'reasons', but like a black hole you will continually fall into asking why those 'reasons' too. It is very unsettling for us to realize and accept that we don't know the whys and therefor for some of the most essential characteristics of our nature.

Creativity is not an accident. It is actually hard work while appearing somewhat serendipitous, somewhat out of our control, and at times a nasty task master. Everyone has creative potential and we all only realize part of what we can be. Some more than others learn to feel comfortable with the unknown, happen to have the luxury of time to explore, the maturity to ask the right question... or to not ask at all, but just to respond, to resonate.

Homage to Robert Leatherbarrow

2010-03-25T21:21:00.001-07:00

I'm a glass artist, but I don't like glass... well, of course I love glass but from a purely personal aesthetic glass for me is like the dumb blond stereotype - very alluring but with little substance. Some of your hard core fine art critiques see it this way too. It is too easy to make something beautiful when glass is the medium. It actually takes very little skill to produce a nice trinket, bowl, or simple craft item. Another part of the problem with glass achieving a fine art status is its deep roots in the crafts and its focus on functionality over expression. Glass is just too darn utilitarian and beautiful for its own good to be taken seriously in the classical fine art sense. The innate beauty of glass can easily detract from an overall composition if not controlled in some manner.

This might sound aloof or somewhat snooty, but when you spend a lot of time doing something and spend a lot of money on it along the way, I feel you should be critical with what you are doing on your journey. It is all to easy to be misguided and off target with your work. These next two posts explore motivations and directions along the way of my creative travels.

I started my glass journey over fifteen years ago doing stained glass, but very quickly became disinterested in the cut and paste and puzzle piecing process of leading together the interlocking positive and negative shapes.When I started fusing the cut and paste mentality was used more often than not by most practitioners and still is today. So the journey for me was to explore what else could be done beyond cut and paste. Don't get me wrong, cut and paste processes are an endless journey in their own right if that's your path. Just take the work of Klaus Moje for example who some call the grandfather of kiln forming.

I was looking for a more organic or naturalistic look, something along the lines of polished stone agates. My attempts where all failures in early years, and realized that achieving anything close to my goals via kilnforming was going to be a very difficult journey. In the end I achieved the most success through torchwrork and casting, and very limited success in the kiln. Back in the early days of the Warm Glass forum I found discussion of the work of Mr.Leatherbarrow intriguing and spent many hours trying to figure out how he accomplished his free flowing fractured looked, but never did figure it out (see image above). It was a very guarded secret back then. He now teaches the effect, and I believe his students are part of a secret society of Leatherbarrowers. Just kidding of course, but the technique still is a bit of a secret I believe.

Some of the naturalistic effects I did achieve via kilnforming centered around the use of copper, mica, and the use of iridescent glass (images left and right).

Time marches on and paths change. I'm now preparing to start a new series of glass powder painting and have put aside my attempts to duplicate the wondrous detail found is polished stone. Quite by accident however, and partly because of a studio partner's influence, I came across a method to duplicate Mr Leatherbarrow's fracture effect (see below). Far too late for my Circular Obsession sculpture series, but satisfying nonetheless since I don't like failing in the brain teasing exercise of backward engineering what others have accomplished.

I will be teaching my approach to the technique in future classes. It is amazingly simple. I found that I could obtain fine grain control over the size of the cracks and the overall amount of fracturing. The fractured area can change in color and in thickness,enabling endless design opportunities. Since it is so easy to do I will have no problem teaching the effect, and then the rest of the class will be exploring different ways to employ it and the many other off shots of powder and wafer techniques.

My glass art journey has been mostly about how to create a balance or contrapuntal composition between the beauty of glass and the overall form within which it is was presented. For my Circular Obsessions sculpture series the overall form had to have interesting textural elements, a sense of visual and physical weight, and interesting surface detailing in order to achieve an integral whole with the all too showy glass components of the design.

Having completed many years of kilnforming explorations I'm finding the use of powders the most promising and the least cut and paste like glass process. I now have control over color, gradation, texture, and a free-form physicality of actually applying painterly strokes with a brush at times. I'm finding that it can be a very painterly-like process if you don't mind wearing a dust mask. Allowing the arm to sway, the hand to arc and the fingers to control the flow of powders is essential in experiencing a sense of color in motion as you build the image layer by layer. I hope to achieve something of a fine art quality in my glass powder painting series, and I believe that might be possible, in part, because the paintings will not look like glass.

My series of glass powder paintings will be done on large glass slabs with naturalistic stone-like edging. The boarding edges will be clear glass, and the painting will gradually build in opacity towards the center of the slab. As in the sculpture series I am back to balancing the overall presenting form (the glass slab in this case) with the glass within it (the powder painting). This time however the powder painting is totally unrecognizable as glass. In a very odd way my tendency to control the showiness of glass has resulted in camouflaging its innate glassiness altogether while at the same time, I feel, liberating the artist to use the medium without the typical constraints that glass imposes as a medium

The cut and paste heritage of glass is totally gone, and a satisfying victory on my journey; the multitude of complications of hot working glass are eliminated; and most importantly I can mix any color to any desired hue and gradation without concern of chemical interactions between the colors (when heated), resulting in turning my blended colors to brown.

This Spring I will be taking a journey down the Mississippi to the bluff country of southeast Minnesota. Very early in the spring just as the leaves are budding each tree has a subtly different favor of green forming a blanket of soft pastel tints of spring green. This with the azure of water and sky will form the basis of my next series..

Weaves, Tiles, and Painting

2010-02-16T17:45:00.000-08:00

There are all kinds of glass working, and many types I thought I would never do. However, now that I'm making a living at it I'm finding reasons to do things that I would have never pursued before. Glass weaving isn't something I would choose to do for myself. It is a technical trick and one of those gee-wiz techniques that makes you ask 'how was that done'. It impresses people and can be fun to do, but unless I get the inspiration to push it in new directions I'll just be teaching the technique to students.

Glass tiles on the other hand I'm doing as part of my attempt to break into the commercial area of art glass. I hope to work with a couple of local interior designers as part of their design team where I produce custom glass as kitchen accents and other home decor uses. Any color combination is possible and on top of that I have the whole arsenal of design techniques that go far beyond the commercial looking tiles here.You can see a whole set of more artsy tiles on my main web site

The glass powder painting below is a finished product. I showed a study for it in a prior post. I intend to pursue large scale powder painting in the future at the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center. I will also be teaching the technique there.

The glass powder painting below took three firings and was my first attempt at layering the powder on over one inch thick to achieve the mountainous look. Brushes, sifters, and mostly my fingers are used to create the design. I call it painting, but it really is more like creating sand art images where by you manipulate the powders in powder form. One of the main challenges to keep in mind as you put the powders on is what the they will look like after being fired. Their prefired color is usually a lot lighter than after firing. It can be tricky, and you seldom get it right in the first firing. Because the base glass is 1/4 inch thick and is 20x29 inches the glass had to fire for nearly a day. In the mean time you hold your breath until you can peak into the kiln to see what the finished piece will look like.

This is a fairly indirect way to produce art, unlike painting where you just put the paint on and what you see is what you get. One reason I like it though (beside the fact that I'm a glass artist) is that it is a seldom used medium. It's exciting to be working in a way that is fairly unique. It is somewhat related to enameling in that you start with a powder, but that's about the only relation. The thickness, the powdery texture, the high relief, and the scale of the work are a few of the characteristics that make it a relatively new way of working in glass.

I'm very excited to be forging this new direction and have only begun the journey.

Little is new however in glass working since periods of exploration have come and gone dating back to ancient Egypt. On the technical side what is intriguing to me about this approach is that I'm only using 90 COE glass powder, and not enamels, paints, stains or any other media but pure glass powder. This restriction is an arbitrary choice, and I intend to experiment with low-fire enamels as a finale stage in the painting process. The reason for this restriction comes from a long standing decision that I only use 90 COE glass, which is a technical category of art glass, in all of my work. You have to create boundaries in order to focus your efforts. Once the basics are understood of a technique then it makes sense to expand the horizons with new materials.

However because of this restriction for many years I was totally frustrated with glass. I wanted it to behave like paint, but the chemical makeup of glass prevents you from thinking like a painter, and glass ultimately restricts your color choices if you can't mix colors at will... unless you like a collection of very different browns.

As many glass artists know, if you mix glass powder and fire it from its powder form back into solid glass the mixed colors will not result in what you expect. For example, yellow and green do not yield a yellow-green hue. Instead the mix gives you brown. This is true for may color combinations.

The magic of glass powder painting is that you do not allow the powders to chemically interact. When firing the glass you stop before the powders liquefy to glass preventing them from chemically interacting. The trick is to fire the powder only to the point that the particles of glass tack fuse together, remaining sand-like, but do not physically meld into one another resulting in chemical interactions.

You have to keep in mind that all glass is basically made of sand AKA silica. Metal oxides are added to silica to give it color. For example, blue is derived from cobalt, red is from gold, and yellows from silver.It is the metal content of glass that interacts when you allow powders to return to their glass state. When firing the powder only to the state that the granules are attached to each other and to the base sheet you then allow the powders to be permanently fixed, but not chemically intermixed.

You can mix powder colors in tints, shades and across hues, and you get the color you mixed and not brown.

I think that is this aspect of glass powder painting that has not been explored thoroughly and what excites me to prob deeper. It is not a new media, and not a totally new technique. Glass powder painting uses a very old media (glass) with a very deliberate desire to expand the scale of work and to move glass further into the territory of classical art forms.

I hope what I have done so far is just the tip of the mountain.

A Giant Pastel To Brighten The Day

2010-01-20T12:39:00.000-08:00

Some days you win and some days the worry worts attack you. What I need to learn is not to get too carried away with any of it. Just do what you do and trust that it will flow your way, which is not easy for a control freak like me.

I will be potentially teaching at four art centers in the coming months, designing the curriculum in two, and found a sustainable side-line (Have Kiln Will Travel) to help small nonprofit organizations raise funds. Sustainable meaning that I'm not just donating time and art work, but have found a way to do what I do, make some money at it, and give the lion's share towards a good cause. All that is not bad for a former computer nerd.

Yes, there are days when someone says no or my emails are never returned. But there is really nothing else to do but stay excited and believe in what you are doing.

The image above is a large 5 foot by 2 foot pastel painting. I started doing pastels as a quick way to design my glass powder paintings. Well, they are kind-of quick, but man... pastels are expensive! I have spent over $300 on them so far, and working in that scale is really messy. The powder floats all over and onto anything near by, mostly because my style is very broad 'brush' with a lot of arm movement and the sticks often shatter and fly about under the sway of enthusiasm.

Years ago when I first picked up pastels I use to do little paintings where you smoothed in everything and most of the work is done just with the finger tips in a somewhat anticipative manner. In contrast now my whole arm and wrist swing wildly sometimes laying down whole fields of color, and using up 1/2 stick of chalk in several swings of my arm... fun but expensive at $4.50 a stick! The only way this style is antiseptic is if I wear a dust mask and vacuum every five minutes!

Anyway... this is no way to experiment. Below is a Photoshop version of a glass powder painting study.I'm about half way done with the study. With drawing tablet in hand I can whip one of these out, do prints of it at high resolution, sell the prints, and it cost me nothing to create the original. That's a much smarter business model.

Maybe I'll leave pastels for now, but the key is too just keep working and doing and pushing forward. No one is going to do it for you.

You Can't Do It All

2010-01-17T11:35:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I hate to admit my limits. The last few days I've been feeling a bit out of sorts, because there are some exciting opportunities available in the form of large and highly visible commissions which I've decided not to apply for. It was hard to come to that decision, and just a little depressing having to realize that my plate is full, and adding any more large commitments just wouldn't be wise no matter how alluring they may be.

The main thing I took away from my recent pondering is that I shouldn't be applying for any grants or commissions for the foreseeable future, and maybe not at all. I've always felt at odds with bending my work to fit some theme or goal of most grants, and worse to propose something I would not be aesthetically engaged in but might win. If you have the free time that's one thing, but chasing down commissions and grants at the expense of your creative direction just isn't right.... for me.

Right now I'm more involved and in tune with my Have Kiln Will Travel adventures, and teaching in general. My engagement at the Chicago Ave Fire Arts Center will be a very substantial commitment of time. Defining and polishing a whole series of glass fusing classes is no small task and is a large responsibility... Let alone the time involved in setting up the glass studio.

On top of teaching I need to push into commercial areas for glass. I would love to be part of one or two local design teams where I'm called in for custom glass applications for home decor.

Then there is the whole adventure of actually doing my own work, and keeping my personal creative direction alive. That is no small matter and can easily languish if my Do It All tendencies are allowed to run away with all of my time.

No, I can't do it all. I need a steady income stream and not the happen stance of grants and commissions at this point.... all the while insuring I'm still having fun.

Its the New Year and New Adventures

2010-01-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

I get up every day and while I wake up with my first cup of java I ponder which of my myriad of adventures needs attention today. Last week I did a little product photography for the Igneous Rock Gallery from Mechanicsburgh, PA. The owner Robert Wertz and I formed a virtual relationship over the web after he saw my sculptures in Sculptural Pursuit magazine. That was last summer and we've be chatting ever since.

Take a look at the site and read the igneous story. These are very unique items that took nature eons to make. The image above is a collection of the rock candle holders I shot.

I've been spending most of my time refining the Have Kiln Will Travel (HKWT) story. I'm very excited about potentially holding the fundraising events are several art centers in the Twin Cites area. I will be meeting with several organizations next week.

Still yet another adventure will be applying for a large $140,000 commission. Sure... anyone can apply, but I think we have a decent chance of actually winning! I've been working on a design with another local artist, both of us have IT geek-land organizational skills and we both are aspiring sculptors. We'll need to form relationships with a couple other folks to pull this off. There is an informational meeting at the Minneapolis Institute of Art later this month. I would imagine every serious sculptor in the Twin Cities will be there... so, maybe on second thought it might not be very easy to win the commission. But if you don't play... you can't win.

Actually, there are a whole set of grants and commissions available over the next few months. It would be great just to get a smaller one.

So much to do and so little time. Over the next few days I'll be heads down planning out classes and equipment purchases for glass classes at two different art centers while at the same time thinking through the paper work for those commissions.... hmmm where is the time for art in all that?

But that's the beauty of it. There are so many varied things to do and I get the chance to wake up every day and choose something and can actually get things done without having to wade through corporate quagmires.

That's nice... real nice.

December Newsletter

2009-12-20T12:43:00.000-08:00

Wow! Only one post this month so far, and I'm not likely to get another one in. I've been way busy creating a new website that turned into a blog called Have Kiln Will Travel. I'm still in process of fine tuning the business model which I'm very excited about.

You can read the details at the blog or by reading the FAQ.

The newsletter wasn't hard to write but thinking through where you've been and summarizing where you're heading can be a bit time consuming. Sort of a mini business brief. I kept it brief - and you can download the newsletter here.

The coming year is looking very good with many teaching opportunities, and I'll continue my Designs For Good efforts by mostly concentrating on Have Kiln Will Travel.

There are a few grant/commission opportunities that I'll be pursing, as well as maturing my glass powder painting work and starting the process of marketing them.

My photography skills will be more sharply focused on serving other photographers in the photo retouching area (aka Photoshop magic), and in establishing my layout and design presence for event and wedding albums.

That's it in a nutshell.

Hope you have an enjoyable Holiday Season!

Oh.... and please support my efforts by forwarding the information for Have Kiln Will Travel to your favorite small nonprofit organization so that I can help them out.

thx

details, details, details

2009-11-22T08:47:00.000-08:00

Now I know why the stereotype of artist not having good business practices probably has some truth to it. I've been spending the last few weeks weeding through the minutia of the why's and how to's of setting up an LLC. That's even less exciting than watching paint dry. Then there are the tax reporting issues. I've always filed jointly (with my wife), but now with an LLC and being self employed who knows what the tax attorney will tell us. That's another meeting.

Last week was mostly dealing with liability and property insurance for my many adventures. Seems that insurance companies still don't know what to do with you unless you fit neatly into one of their 'classes' for coverage. Thankfully, with a few phone calls to several groups that specialize in helping 'ceative' groups and individuals, I was able to find agencies that can be creative in setting up coverage for us round pegs trying to fit into square holes.

Fractured Atlas is one of those organizations as well as Springboard For The Arts. Thanks to these organizations I didn't have to spend twice the amount for coverage, and was able to trust that I might actually have a policy that isn't full of loopholes.

Without these organizations to help I can easily see why creatives sometimes avoid doing basic business practices. It isn't that creatives are lazy or ignorant of such... it's just that the business world in many cases just doesn't know how to work with creatives, and translates that into what appears to the creatives as (and in some cases actually is) over charging.

More details...

Last week I had my first test of the "Have Kiln Will Travel" concept. The test class at local high school was a success. This was gratifying since a few months of prep as well as thousands of dollars went into getting ready for the test. The amount of gear and glass going to a site turned into a bit of logistical problem. I ended up with a truckload of 80 gallon tupperware roughneck containers to hold all the stuff (including 6 kilns).

OK... now what. Do I have to load, then unload the truck full of gear after every event? No way! I just want to keep it locked up in my truck when I'm at the studio. Which means that I have to buy a set of equipment that is dedicated just for Have Kiln Will Travel and not for studio use. OK, no problem. But the gear must be covered and secured. So that means a $1500 topper for my truck!

Yikes! How many thousands am I going to pour into this?

Well, thankfully I think I'm done with all the major expenses. Now I'm off to create the web site for Have Kiln Will Travel, and I'll do most of that myself. I might call in a Flash expert to do a little work, and hopefully it won't cost too much.

It is ofen said that it takes money to make money... I guess that is even true when you are doing fund raising.

A Have Kiln Will Travel Update

2009-11-11T22:03:00.000-08:00

Nothing is ever simple with me. I'll bend twist and turn an ideal inside out until either it is dead or something unexpected comes to mind. The Have Kiln Will Travel concept hasn't even been implemented yet, and I can already see it working in multiple forms.

The original idea was to teach at Community Ed centers. Shortly there after came the idea of doing it at art centers throughout my region, and now the third form of the idea has me really reeling with possibilities.

Why not give fused glass parties just like Tupperware parties? The Designs For Good flavor of this is that the 'host' gets most of the 'take'. It goes like this... A nonprofit or charitable group needs to raise a bit of change. Not a lot mind you, maybe just around a thousand dollars or so. The nonprofit group (aka host) calls 12 or so 'donors', and invites them to a glass fusing party where they can make all kinds of gifts (belt buckles, earrings, pendants, money clips, etc). The host knows just about how much to ask a donor to attend the party. Depending on who the host calls they stand to make a considerable amount of money just for an afternoon of fun.

The host gets to have fun holding the event and (of course) sorely needed funds.
I walk away with some portion of the proceeds to support my costs.
The guests have a grand time making stuff and also go home with a pocket full of jewelry and other 'wearable' glass items which could be valued far beyond the amount that they donated.

I might get arrested for this idea it is soooo goood!

Of course there are a LOT of details to make this happen, but leave it to my IT background to be designing and testing out every technical and logistic nuance of the idea before bringing it to the public.

Well... actually I'm so sure that it is going to work that I have contacted dozens of centers of various sorts and I'm already scheduled....

This is going to be such a great Designs For Good initiative!

Getting Feedback & Food For Thought

2009-11-11T09:43:00.000-08:00

To carry on from some thoughts from the prior post.... Getting feedback is critical for growth and can help confirm that you're on the right track. Finding that feedback may be difficult when it comes to your career. In my case I'm changing careers so I have to relearn where and how to get suggestions and advice.

Entering competitions I'm finding is very gratifying when you win or place well, but unless you can corner a judge and ask specific questions all that you come away with is that you did good. At the Twin Cities Professional Photographers Association (TCPPA) yearly print competition I did fairly well for a first time entrant. I made some novice mistakes in presentation that probably turned excellence into just above average entries. I'm not happy with that of course, but more to the point there were so many entries that it was impossible to get real feedback. I got scores, but don't really know in detail what needs improvement.

Winning the yearly competition held by Sculptural Pursuit magazine was the topic of a prior post. A few months after that I entered into another magazine's competition, namely Aesthetica. Aesthetica engages with contemporary art, contextualising it within the larger cultural framework. It was founded in 2002, and Aesthetica Magazine is one of Britain's leading art publications.

I was recently notified of being a finalist in their competition and recieved the following from them to be used as a blub...

"The second Aesthetica Creative Works Annual explores the imagination. This book showcases artwork and creative writing from over 30 countries. The anthology contextualises the larger cultural framework by asking probing questions about the current state of affairs: the economy, globalisation, technology and the environment. Moreover it offers a platform from which to analyse the art we producing today. Its cutting-edge nature offers you autonomy. As the reader, this book provides an insight into our deepest thoughts, anxieties and aspirations. Art becomes the tonic for the modern world."

I'm honored of course, and probably will feel more so when I become familiar with the magazine. However, I'm not sure of the judging criteria and consequently do not know what I should feel good about specifically. The photographs sent in were judged deserving of publication. I should be happy with that alone.

After all, my images where chosen from 12,000 sent into the competition from many countries!

Time to grow up Jim... is what I'm telling myself. You're doing good. Stop being so insecure.

Twin Cities Professional Photographers Annual Print Competition

2009-10-30T20:40:00.000-07:00

Like the Power Ball, you can't win if you don't enter. Actually, more important than winning the competition is just obtaining professional level feedback. It isn't easy finding someone who is willing to truly give their opinion and the opinion is coming from a source worth listening to. You might get it if you in a school program, but even then many teachers are very guarded in their critique. You can't afford to lose a student. Programs survive and are measured by a graduation rate. If a critique inadvertently discourages students, then you are potentially doing serious harm to your program.

So, I'm entering the following prints just for the chance to be told how they may be improved - what are the qualities that are not necessarily good? The Internet community is mostly caulk full of empty praise, encouraging maybe, but not useful. I don't know, maybe I'm just strange. I respect and would be more interested in professional or personal associations which regularly offer criticism. For me, that is a real sign that they are interested enough in you (or your work) to hope for improvement.

So... please do forward suggestions for improvement. They'll be greatly appreciated. The only thing to realize is that these prints (16x20) will have a lot of painterly-like detail in them that isn't visible in these small files.

The first image is called Faux Fly and are a collection of butterfly wings I found over 30 years ago walking along country roads in Kentucky. The butterflies where so numerous in that area that these were the ones I found along the sides of roads (killed by cars). I knew I would do something with them someday. They have been in a Skippy jar with moth balls all those years.

The second is called Angel of Death and is described in a prior post.

The third image is called Water Lily and the last is Aeon which is part of my Circular Obsessions sculpture series.

Puppies Saved From Drowning

2009-10-28T23:23:00.000-07:00

One of my Designs For Good projects is PawPADs. They are a service dog training center which is starting from ground zero. Well they are not at zero any longer. This is turning into an amazing story. In a matter of months PawPADs has been growing rapidly. They were given 7 acres, a house for the new training center, have attracted a bevy of volunteers, and now they acquired 7 Labrador puppies destined to become service dogs. That is, after $25,000 is invested in training and keeping each dog over several years.

These puppies are destined to become service dogs now. They were destined to be drowned by a heartless owner.

Earlier today I did my fist photo shoot with the dogs. The plan is to follow the dogs through their years of training and then into their service appointment for a person in need. The dogs are trained for over 70 different behaviors such as opening doors, turning on lights, and picking things up from the floor. These behaviors are the 'service' in service dogs.

Far beyond that of course is the human-canine bond that these dogs provide. These newborns are so small and weak now it is hard to imagine what an absolute essential role they will play during their life in service of another.

Another Designs For Good Project

2009-10-21T19:25:00.000-07:00

Another project..... well actually three birds with one stone. I will be producing a set of prints for VEAP (Volunteers Enlisted To Assist People) and CRC as mentioned in a prior post. I will use some of the same prints for both events. Additionally, I need to print these images so that I can review them for the yearly print competition of the Twin Cities Professional Photographers Association. I will use the prints for these fundraisers as test prints for the competition.

I've already made significant changes to the images after actually having them in hand. Most of the changes wouldn't matter or even be noticed by the average person. However, they are being critiqued and scored on categories such as: composition, color balance, lighting, impact, style, presentation, and technical excellence to name a few. Consequently, every little improvement counts towards your overall score.

The image below is one of my favorites. I call it The Angel Of Death. I found the dead bird in my yard and just couldn't let it pass without doing something with it. The little cherub yard ornament is also something I love to play with so I put them both together in the setting sun creating a chiaroscuro effect.

That is just the start. Most of the magic of the image comes from using Lightroom, Photoshop, and other 3rd party photoshop plugins. I strive to not go overboard with making a photograph look like a painting. There is a balance between creating impact and losing it if the image looks overworked by playing with too many image editing tools.

Send me an email or comment below to let me know what you think. Maybe your comments will help me along in the competition.

Have Kiln Will Travel

2009-10-17T17:26:00.000-07:00

A tower of power! Well actually more like 6 midgets stack on their shoulders. These are the kilns I will be using for my teaching adventures. The orange boxes are the temperature controls on the front of each kiln and the kiln tops (lid) and bottoms are stacked to the right. They are only 6 inch square on the inside. Perfect for small projects and testing.

These are neat to play with because you can fire small project with full ramp up and back down in around two hours. The lids have a view port so you can watch the progress of your project without opening the kiln and letting all the heat out.

I've been fusing for well over ten years and I've never really watched the glass bake that closely. You usually sneak a peak, but with all the heat getting out you can't just stand there and watch.

This is a great learning device because knowing what glass does at different temperatures is critical for some designs.

The bracelet above was my first project in one of the new kilns. This was made with dichroic crackle glass. Being able to watch the firing very closely enabled me to stop the firing precisely when the full effect (crackle) was achieved. I learned how to make this item and bought the finding at J Ring Glass Studio which is my wholesale supplier. Always good talking with Joe & Susan. They have been in the glass business so long that there isn't much about the stained glass and kilnformed art forms that don't know about.

I'll have my hands full at the moment putting together project outlines for my Have Kiln Will Travel adventures and more serious classes for the Chicago Ave Fire Arts Center. Class design will be all that I'll be doing for the next couple of weeks.... but maybe I'll sneak out to fry some more dichroic in my little orange midgets.

Fall & Time For Reflection

2009-10-10T16:50:00.000-07:00

Oh...Boy. We are starting Winter already here in frozen Minnesota. We had our first snow last night and today it was below freezing most of the day. At this rate the pumpkins won't even make it to Halloween.

I took this picture of our cat Mia and her friend last year. The biggest event for me this year was quiting my IT job and now I'm working three times as hard as I ever did... but loving it!

Jean (my wife) and I returned from our yearly visit to the same Vermilion lake cabin that we have gone to for over 10 years. This is always a time of refection for both of us, and as a couple. Since we are "trapped" together for 5 days in a cabin with not much else to do we mull over may things that we don't regularly have time for.

This year we talked a bit about my adventures and we agreed that it is too early to really know how things will turn out, and that we are both willing to let "things play out" for a while... and boy are there things that need a bit of time to play out.

Art glass commissions, project collaborations, consignment arrangements, several Designs For Good projects (and more to come), becoming a kilnformed glass teacher in a big way, expanding my marketing efforts, and then there is the whole commercial side of my art glass that I will be exploring over the next few weeks.

God knows what will come of any one of these efforts. The teaching direction has really taken on a life of its own and shows great potential. I have a friend helping me out, and continually reminds me of the things I take for granted, because I've been doing kilnformed glass for over a decade. Simple things that are second nature to me can ruin a project if not done properly.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.... even if that means providing a complete step by step project plan for those students who will need it... and as my friend is pointing out more will need it than I think.

To the right is an image of one of the first items I made as a project example. It is a belt buckle with dichroic glass. It is hard to go wrong with dichroic glass. It is soooo glitzy.

I completely stayed away from dichroic when I was doing my art glass series, so it is now fun to indulge.

Everyday starts a new challenge in the multiple paths I'm pursuing. It will indeed be interesting to see where the paths lead.

Another Designs For Good Effort

2009-10-07T23:24:00.000-07:00

As a result of a bit of promotion in the south minneaplois newspapers I will embarking on new Designs For Good effort. This time with the Conflict Resolution Center which will be hosting an art auction to raise funds.

The mission of CRC is to:
Strengthen communities by teaching and providing mediation and conflict resolution services.
For over 25 years, CRC has provided communities with the tools to peacefully and effectively resolve disputes.

I will be donating several digial art prints at the Art Affair event which will be held Nov 6th and 7th at the Colonial Church in Edina, MN.

I would also like to thank the folks who produce the twin cities south metro newspaper for giving me a nice one page spread about Designs For Good. I'll post separately on this at a future point.

On Vacation : Still Focusing

2009-09-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

Focusing my camera is more fun than focusing on my career change. These are a few shots from our first couple days at Lake Vermillion near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area about one hour from the Canadian boarder.

Jean and I go there every year to unwind, but also to check in to see where we are with each other and life in general. The big event for me this year was making my career change and all the hand-wringing that goes along with a lose of income.

Neither of us are overly concerned at this point since I do have a broad-brush plan on what exactly I need to accomplish. At this point I'm very excited about the next few months and especially the next few weeks when I begin my 'commercial relationships' efforts.

I plan on visiting interior designers, tile shops, architectural glass fabricators, and high-end kitchen and bath design centers. The goal is to form the type of relationship where they begin to offer (my work) Kilnformed Art Glass accent pieces, and that this becomes a common offering when the client wants something highly customized and unique.

Granite is great, but art glass is truly one of a kind and capable of accenting any existing home decor choices.

Besides my education efforts and this commercial relationship effort I will also be expanding my gallery efforts as mentioned in the last posting. I plan on several types of offerings ranging from very decorative items to more fine art related items.

It will take a little time for all three areas to play out, and I'll have to be patient.

The fallback plan to to dive into the Adobe CS4 suite and become an Adobe nerd. This brings me closer to my IT roots if I end up doing Flash/Dreamweaver/Photoshop for web development.... but I'll stop short of letting anyone know I was a DBA. The last thing I want to do is to end up doing database work again.

I think I'll work at Home Depot before that happens....

Hey... do they sell art glass at Home Depot?... maybe they should. I did notice that Kohler is selling their free standing glass wash basins at hardware outlets which is a very hot glass item. Theirs are just clear though. Mine could be any color or texture.

And you know... the well-to-do don't want want can be bought at Home Depot.... that's were I come in.

Another Designs For Good Effort

2009-09-27T16:21:00.000-07:00

In an effort to raise money and awareness of the Chicago Ave. Fire Arts Center (CAFAC) I will be embarking on a collaboration with two other artists namely Laura d Juul (Precious Metal Clay) and Larry Fahnoe (Metaling working). We will be creating a series of wall hangings based on our various skills. Larry will create the metal frame, I will create the glass powder painting to be framed and Laura and I will collaborate on the matting around the painting. The matting will be enameled copper with precious metal clay (sliver) decorative accents.

Our mission will be to have them placed on permanent display at local galleries to help spread the word about the center. We'll have informational postcards available so that the public can read out the center and its dual goal of arts education and neighborhood revitalization.

Of course, they will be for sale also with all proceeds going to the center.

Stayed tuned for pictures and progress of this effort.

Those That Can't Do Teach?

2009-09-19T17:44:00.000-07:00

Not sure how true the truism in the title is.

As part of my many splendid ventures to survive as an artist and designer I've decided to take on teaching as one income stream.

Have kiln will travel.... I bought six of these little buggers to the left, and I'll be teaching the basics of kilnformed glass to anyone who cares to listen.

Right now I'm working with two community education programs and I hope to expand that to a half dozen sites and multiple classes per semester. The initial startup cost is less than $3000 so I might actually make a profit in my life time.

Focus, focus and more focus

2009-09-16T20:06:00.000-07:00

I once worked on a web design with a client. We started talking about: goals for the site; who the audience is; what the logo should be; what the corporate image is; styles, and style sheets; how to measure success of the site; and so on.

We got stuck on the very basic issue of designing a logo. I was asking questions like: what should it resplendent; is the company looking to standardize on color; what are your products; where is the company heading in the next few years; what emotion or feelings or typical customer thoughts should be provided by the logo?

His replay... jokingly, was that he just wanted a logo, and not psychotherapy!

We never finished the project.

Focus is terribly difficult. Defining oneself in a nutshell be it in a logo or web design/layout is challenging.

In the last few weeks I've redone my site jimbolesdesigns.com. In my case, it was obvious that I'm wasn't focused when looking at my old site. My new site is a bit more focused, but I expect it to be a living breathing thing. As I redefine my life my site will change to reflect that.

In my new site I finally (after 10 years) have put aside my EyeCandy/Crafts portion of the site. It is still accessible, but it is not part of the 'official' site. I'll use the EyeCandy part for my teaching adventures that I'm embarking on. As for the main site as it is now, it is focused on my glass and design skills.

I the near term, I will be approaching designers, wholesale tile shops, and architectural glass fabricators. It is hard to compartmentalize yourself when you see so much potential, so many things you could do. But it is also liberating reducing the world of potentiality to a workable approachable subset. The reduction process leaves you with a target, and more importantly a definition of what services you DO provide and who may benefit from them.

Everyday when I go to my studio or sit down to the wonderful Adobe CS4 suite I find myself asking what should I be doing versus what I could. It is nice, comforting actually, to live in the world of full potentiality... a constant state of becoming. But I'm finding it more interesting as of late in dealing with the very narrow confines of what can be.... now, in this place, with what I have.

Focus... hone, redefine and refine... then reiterate.

This is every day of your life. It never ends.

Letting Go & Focus

2009-08-27T15:38:00.001-07:00

As mentioned in a previous post I was once heavily involved in water gardening. Today marks the passing of the remnants of those days. After keeping fish for well over 15 years I found a young boy who will get my last freshwater planted tank... CO2 system and all.

Nice 30 gallon setup naturally balanced where the fish waste is fully absorbed by the plant life. Never had algae, never had to clean it. Mostly because of the CO2 which the plants need to thrive, and good lighting of course. The plants out compete the algae for the nutrients (aka fish poop).

Maybe I found a friend today and he'll come by to ask the whys and how-tos of keeping the little ecosystem balanced. Then again, maybe not. Maybe he'll just dump fish into it from the pet store and all my guppies and Amano shrimp that have been in there for 10 years will die of diseases from the new fish. Didn't know that those little shrimp could live that long. I don't think they bred in a tank. Can't say that for the guppies. I'm on the 50th generation of guppies... all from six or eight I bought many years ago.

Anyway... got to move on, and let go of all that. I'm a design nerd now. Got to focus.

Third draft & I'll bet I'm only half done

2009-08-27T13:10:00.000-07:00

Not bad for a 3rd draft of just the layout/design. Then there will to be the web version. This will require putting the image though a tool to create 'hot spots' (links) on the image to more info, and the link to PayPal, and maybe a audio file of the director of PawPADs talking about the fund raiser.

Then for the print version there will probably be issues with enlarging to a poster size 20x30 print. I had to start with a small jpeg (shot with a point and shot camera) of the dog. Enlarging my be a challenge.

But I'm done for the day. Now off to do my own fliers for my glass adventures.

My new HP B8550 is cooperating at least. After a bit of fussing I was able to get boardless 8.5 x 11 prints which compete with professionally printed fliers.... hey... I'm am a professional. What am I saying?

Ok... now for the nerdy design stuff. Click on the image and take a look at the dogs front paw. Doesn't it look like it is pushing down on the cushion and the shadows were added too. I love using the warp tool on things. You can really take the years off of a person... warping that fat away :)

Wheel Chairs Dogs & Chicken And The Egg

2009-08-25T17:50:00.000-07:00

Since I stopped my IT job I just don't know what adventures the day will bring me. Yesterday it was successfully savaging for $400 dollars of metal to be used a CAFAC when it opens, then doing a crazy photo shoot at the Como Conservatory.

Today I was back at PawPADS reviewing the fund raiser poster and newsletter I'm doing for them. The poster is now going into its third draft. The first draft at this link shows the image where I cut the dog out of. The second suffered from the same issue of the lack of an obvious call to action. That is, it wasn't obvious what a person was supposed to do after reading the poster.

Back to ground zero. We all like the cute puppy. But the dog has grown up since then. The puppy was on wheel chair in the old picture, but no one would really see it unless they look closely... and who does look that close except design nerds.

The solution is to cut the puppy out of the old picture, shoot a nice shot of a wheel chair by itself, and then place the puppy into the wheel chair picture via the magic of photoshop. Now we can use this image in multiple pieces of literature.

OK, so that's the wheel chair and dogs part of the post. The chicken and egg part is simply the struggle I'm seeing when working with nonprofits. Most people don' t want to participate or donate to startups. How do you get the word out if the media doesn't see a story and won't waste the ink on you? Of course this is not only true of NPOs. I guess it is also true of someone like me starting a career over.

Good things do happen however.... and sometimes absolutely magical things. Like PawPADs getting 7 acres of land AND a house donated to them just by visiting the right yard sale and meeting someone.

Or like me meeting a PR person today at the PawPADs meeting. No telling what good might come out of that.

Dreams Come True

2009-08-23T22:40:00.000-07:00

When we first moved to the frozen north (Minnesota) Jean and I became involved in all sorts of gardening just to enjoy what seems at times too short summers and too long winters. We joined MN Water Garden Society and did some volunteer work and went to a few meetings. In my usual over-the-top approach I remembered that the Como Park Conservatory's water gardens were really poorly done. I called and talked to the curator and she would welcome help from our society to put their ponds in order.

Long story short... this was a lesson in group dynamics and how good intentions regardless of how good can die on the vine. I drew up a thirty page plan on how to care for the conservatory's indoor water features and presented it to the board of our water garden society. It wasn't well received. There were reasonable, but suspiciously specious complaints about how we were going to 'man' such an effort. Shouldn't the water garden society be excited by this opportunity, the chance to care for one of the premiere indoor water garden features in the state?

Months later I accidentally met a board member at Home Depot. His advice off the record was just to go do it without involving the board. Hmmm.... maybe good advice to get things done, but that would probably end my relationship with most of the board members. I can only imagine what negative thoughts were brewing as a new-be member was outlining a plan to lead such a visible and relatively important effort.

Long story short... (and I mean it this time), the curator at the conservatory had a lot of dreams and very little funding. One of her dreams was to raise topical lotus flowers, the type that have leaves greater than 36 inches across (as seen to the right). When one of these plants puts out a series of leaves the space needed may be as much as 8 foot in diameter. Not to mention the need for sun, heat, water conditions etc. These plants live in the tropics to get them to not only grow but to bloom in Minnesota is no small feat, and on top of that having the space to hold 20 or more plants!

I spent an hour or so at the conservatory today. I wonder what turn my life would have taken if my plan for the water garden society's involvement at the conservatory would have been received as an opportunity instead of some sort of usurpation or upcomeance .

The pictures in this post and at this Flickr page are proof that dreams can come true and in a very impressive way. For me these lotus flowers and water lilies are the best thing at the conservatory by far.

There are always nay-sayers in the crowd both for your plans and your dreams.

Giving Can be Difficult

2009-08-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't have thought so, but I'm learning that giving is a little harder than I thought it would be. Specifically, using my Circular Obsessions series to raise money for nonprofit organizations (NPO). There are various barriers that I was unaware of going into this.

Firstly, there is a certain level of distrust or in more politically correct terms a questions of transparency. And then there is the fact that many people are turned off by the question of where the money actually goes when NPOs raising money or worse when they contract out fundrasing organizations who do the work for them.

Secondly, I was hoping to make just enough money to pay for materials for the creation of new works so that I could perpetuate the process. This then involves three parties: the NPO, myself, and the 'donor', and how this transaction is handled legally and in accordance with tax/NPO laws and bylaws is a little messy. In fact, the rules vary by state and other nuances that I would need a lawyer to figure out.

Further, if we then try to fit in a tax break to the donor (which was part of my overall scheme to make the transaction as favorable as possible for all), then we have even more complications at tax time.

Lastly, the simplest approach would be for me just to sell the items and give money directly to an NPO and forget about tax breaks to the donor, and the recognition they deserve for making the donation. This approach has a major drawback though. If I'm just out there selling my work, then I have to compete head-to-head with other artist. This would significantly lower the price point of my work just to get it sold, resulting in small net gains to donate.

Hmmm, I have some rethinking to do.

Anyway... I can always just go out to my yard and shoot frogs when things are not going my way.

There seems to be an abundace of these tree frogs this year. They are perfect subjects. They just sit there and let you get as close as you want. I should pull out my macro lens and see if I can shoot a closeup of a frog eye.

pawPADs Photo Shoot

2009-08-10T21:41:00.000-07:00

Shot a set of images for pawPADs. Some will be used in literature and some in a photo journalism piece. You can see a few more at my Flickr page.

Click slideshow at the upper right of the page after using the link above.

These were done using the Topaz Simplify and the Imagenomic Portraiture plugins in Photoshop. I'm really liking the style. Not to painterly, but not too realistic either.

Enjoy!

Nature's Complementary Colors

2009-08-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

On my way to a photo shoot and saw this little green thing in a Hydrangea blossom. It is a Gray Tree Frog which depending on locale and time of year can be green. Looks green to me.

Powderhorn Art Fair

2009-08-09T17:56:00.000-07:00

Spent most of this weekend in Minneapolis participating in the yearly Powderhorn Art Fair. Nice location along one of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes and all of the arts and crafts you can handle. The Chicago Ave Fire Arts Center had a meet-and-greet booth there, and we told the story of the center's startup early next year. It will be a unique center teaching welding, enameling, neon, blacksmithing, jewelery, precious metal clay, and kilnformed glass which I will be teaching.

One of the goals of the weekend was to show what will be taught. For instance the piece below is an example of what could be done by a student. The metal work and the glass work (glass powder painting) would be taught over several classes. The center will encourage this type of mixed media collaborative effort.

Glass Marketing Weekend

2009-08-06T14:24:00.001-07:00

These pics are of our room at the hotelVetro in Iowa City. The Sheraton was full and my potential glass commission client was at the Vetro... so why not stay there. There are 220 reasons per night why not, but it was so convenient we had to do it.

It was decked out in post-modern decor as you can see by the pictures at the left. The top image is of the tube and the door to the bathroom is to the left. It was a huge hunk of frosted and tempered glass measuring at least 6x7 feet. It was hung on a track with wheels which you pulled closed kind of like a barn door. Not elegant, but definitely minimalist.

Concrete floors a flat platform sink and monochrome color scheme. There was absolutely no color per say. The whole room was desaturated hues. Interesting, but I wouldn't recommend it unless your into that sort of thing. The furniture was Ikea quality. OK, but nothing to really recommend it.

Our dinner was very nice though and we had a good time talking over the glass project, the site, pets, and life in general.

The next step is to put together a proposal for the project which I"m looking forward to. It will be approximately 40 sq feet of glass, and the design will be fun to execute.

The design will be based on a lose interpretation of the mountain environment of the cabin in the California mountains. Since the cabin is of contemporary design this gives me a lot of freedom.

I also had the opportunity to deliver a set of small Fritflower panels to a customer in Iowa and left a few panels behind to be sold in a flower shop. This will be a bit of test marketing. I'm glad to find someone who is willing to help me explore the correct combination of price and design.

Sculptural Pursuit Cover

2009-08-02T18:20:00.000-07:00

Hooorah! The magazine has been publish, and I got my copies a few days ago. What a Long Strange Trip Its Been is all I can say. The article mostly covers a lot of my early life trying to find my way in the arts and life in general. Admittedly, I've had a very circuitous path in discovering where I fit in the art world.

I'm very please with the cover art and of the quality of the whole magazine. I never imagined that my work would make the cover of a tasteful magazine like Sculptural Pursuit. There isn't a lot of technical detail in the article which is a bit disappointing, because the Circular Obsession series is mixed media and it is hard to fully appreciate the work unless you are familiar with what went into making it.

Maybe I can get published in another magazine to cover that angle! .... hmmm

Designs For Good is Taking Off!

2009-07-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

Boy... A bit overwhelmed at the moment.

Leaving for Iowa tomorrow to talk over a art glass commission of two free hanging panels of 5 by 4 foot, and to also meet with a store owner who may want to sell some of my craft-end items like FritFlowers as can be seen here.

I squeezed in the time to create a prototype of the glass panels. Even if the commission doesn't come my way I can still use it as an example piece at CAFAC for my kilnformed glass students.

I've started working with the owner of PawPADs as another Designs For Good effort. PawPADS is about.... Pawsitive Perspectives Assistance Dogs (PawPADs) is a 501c3 non-profit organization whose mission is to facilitate the power of the human-canine bond, and enhance the lives of others, through the process of training assistance dogs and the outcome of partnering them with people with disabilities.

My first mission was to produce a flyer for their fund raiser. Pretty simple layout with a bunch of paw prints in the background and a cute image of a puppy that I made into puzzle pieces using Photoshop.

It is an amazing amount of money, to the tune of $25,000, goes into turning a rambunctious puppy into a dependable helper for a disabled person.

Another project will be to do a photojournalism piece for them. For this project I will be following a puppy from beginning to the end of its training to illustrate just what is involved, and how the dogs achieve their goal of aiding a person in need.

I've got my eye on a few other nonprofits as well and I'll post those when we iron out some of the details.

On the Circular Obsessions front, I'm starting to get fan mail as a result of the Sculptural Pursuit Magazine Award. It is gratifying to hear from people. I'm really hopeful to sell a few of the works and it will be a wonderful experience to be able to donate a majority of the proceeds to worthy nonprofit ventures like PawPADs.

Oh... and I guess I have to officially announce that I am no longer working at my IT job as a Database Administrator. I quite. Yes, jumped over the edge. Designs For Good in now my full time obsession.

Wish me well! I couldn't be more excited about my future!

Kooza!

2009-07-20T12:25:00.000-07:00

I knew a little bit about the background of Cirque Du Soleil having seen the Bravo special where they take you behind the scenes and go into quite a bit of detail on how the shows are put together including: the extensive training facilitates; costume design process; development of the acts; lighting; staging, etc, etc, etc.

In the case of Cirque Du Soleil the list etcetera's are really extensive... mind numbing actually. This is especially true after you've actually gone to a show and have seen the infrastructure to physically produce the show.

I'm blogging about this, because at times when working on a design project the list of things that need to occur, and completed in a certain order seems overwhelming. Just to produce a flyer may take a small team of folks all with distinct skills and tasks. I can't imagine the totality of tasks, logistics, and decisions that went into producing Kooza.

The insurance and liability considerations alone are beyond me. OK, sure the performers could be hurt. That goes without saying. But the audience is at risk also, and knowingly so was the amazing thing to me. At one comedic interlude with clowns running all over the audience, all of a sudden one of the chairs in the audience lifted a poor unsuspecting women 10 yards into the air! It was a hydraulic chair and it kept going up and down as the audience screamed with laughter watching the poor women's reactions to being repeatedly thrust into the air.

OK, maybe she was a plant and it was all planned, but it certainly didn't look like it. But that is only one of the audience dangers of the show. At one point a performer stacked chairs nearly two stories high and then balanced himself on top of them all. Yea, he could fall, but what about all those chairs? If they all came tumbling down they would have scattered across the stage and into the audience. Those where heavily constructed chairs and would put a-world-of-hurt on someone if hit by one.

Having not been to a circus since childhood what impressed me in this age of flat screens is how three dimensional the show was. Even theatrical productions seem only two dimensional since they occur on a stage that goes from left to right, that is, not in the round like Kooza . I found myself looking up at the high wire acts, behind me at the audience participation, as well as left and right to keep an eye on those clowns. I even looked under my chair to insure that it wasn't hydraulic!

No need in discussing the lighting, costumes, special effects, the live band, moving stages etc, etc. I think anyone remotely familiar with the arts can think through those details.

The art and design aspects were top notch of course. What impressed me was the sum of the parts, the whole experience. With the 30 minute intermission you had time to enjoy a couple of beers and have a snack while walking around the outside of the tents. I was extremely impressed with the permanence built into this short run event. No simple stakes in the ground holding up this massive complex of tents. They actually had thick metal cables hooked to concrete foundations forming the main support structure. Additionally, a series of 1 inch metal cables spaced every five feet were near the tents and circled the whole perimeter. These were attached to 2 inch thick steel stakes that were somehow drilled through the asphalt and who knows how deep into the ground.

I expected a good show and it was better than I thought it might be. I can be easily bored with contortionists and high wire acts. There was an act or two that I wasn't impressed with, but you could always use that time to look around at how they orchestrated the flow of acts, blending from one into the next for an uninterrupted sense of magic. There was a team of pulley boys stationed right in the audience who rose and lowered equipment from one act to another in concert with the lights shifting your attention towards the oncoming act, and away from the darkened equipment as it was being tucked away into the ceiling.

The artistry I expected. What impressed me just as much was the supporting infrastructure and operational coordination exposed to your inspection. That is, if you saw beyond the theatrical tricks which guided your attention to center stage... or the clowns off stage as the case may be while the pulley boys did their own sort of magic.

Kooza! Truly a multidimensional Tour de Force.

A Slave to the Pen

2009-07-12T22:11:00.000-07:00

Ehh gads! Another weekend spent in front of the word processor instead of having fun! I managed to get the MAEP proposal sent out only to fall prey to an available MN state grant for photography. I'll post the proposal when completed, but what a process! I can see why grant writing is actually a career for some people... and this is just a small grant.

I love it though... results focused. They actually want to know how the grant will change your career. Ok... deep breath... how many artist actually conceptualize their career path? And then... put an action plan together to get from point 'A' to 'B'?

A lot of deep thought has to go into that, along with some serious self examination.... and reality based at that!... why am I using so many exclamation points?

Do they offer grant writing as a class in fine arts academies?

I'll never forget the day my freshmen Design teacher at CMU came into class, looked around the class, and said "none of you are going to make a living in the arts". He didn't mean it personally, just as a general statement, and actually a challenge for self examination. But many of the students just took it as the old coot just getting out of the wrong side of the bed that day, or, just ignored what he said.

My reaction... was to leave school after that year. Not so much because of what he said, but because I've always been a bit inner-focused, and didn't see myself following in the footsteps of Andy Warhol who was often the topic of discussion, and who left CMU after a year or two. I left, unlike Andy, because I could never shoulder the facade, avant guard mantle or the hairdo as Andy did so well. I couldn't even go to a simple senior art opening without feeling simultaneously beneath and above that scene. AKA... out of place.

Yea... it is complex and I need therapy... not.

Designs For Good is my resolution and salvation.

I'm feeling good about the grant submission. It actually made me think about a career and why someone should give me money to further it.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Douglas (Pick) Pickering, who inspired me by being honest about our limitations in the face of the realities of the art world, while at the same time pushing us to ever higher standards.

OK... picture time.

I did take time to go to our garden to refresh my spirit. The following are a set of images of the Beebalm plant. I ran it through the Topaz Simplify filter and came up with the following. The first (top-left) is the untouched shot, and the second is the image run through the Topaz filter. You don't see a tremendous difference until you drill into the image by cropping smaller and smaller. Then you begin to see how the filter abstracted the image into elements of pure lines and color/hue shifts. You could go deeper into the image, but at that point is just becomes pure color and pattern.

You can click on the final image to get a close up of it, and you'll begin to see how the filter breaks the image down. Looking at that last enlargement it is hard to see how it is actually the same image (same jpg file) as the one at top right. Once you click on the image open your window as wide as possible and the picture will expand.

Enjoy!

Taking A Break

2009-07-03T00:58:00.000-07:00

For me taking a break means doing all the tasks that I've been avoiding while working on my 'real' tasks. These 'relaxing' tasks are : filling the bird feeders, watering the garden, taking one or two items off of Jean's (my wife) To Do list, and in this case this week I shot a few photos of the garden which I haven't done yet this year.

The image to the left is a typical close up of some Tiger Lilies. Not too impressive. So I took the image into Photoshop and used the Topaz Simplify filter on it and then added some Gaussian noise to it and come up with something that looks a lot like the texture and smooth feel of a glass powder painting (see image below). It would be interesting to try to do a photo realistic powder painting based on this image. You can see a large version of the image here.

In the larger version you really get the sense of the sandy texture that is the hallmark of a glass powder painting. It is a model to use if trying to simulate powder painting before committing a design to glass. Just amazing what you can do in Photoshop. With this Photoshop technique I could shoot a series of photos and run them through the Photoshop filters, change the composition, contrast, colors, etc and have a digitally worked out study done in twenty minutes or so. Bullseye glass is expensive so you want a worked out study before attempting it for real in glass.

Well enough play for today. Tomorrow I have to commit to getting the MAEP proposal printed. My new HP B8550 printer could probably do the job, but sitting around and doing 48 prints on an ink jet isn't my idea of fun, especially since White House Custom Color has a sale on 8x10s this week.

On another note, the folks at Sculptural Pursuit magazine encouraged me to create my web page on their site. At 3AM I wrapped that up and you can see it at this link. If you've been to my site then there is no need to go to that page however, because there aren't any new images to see there. The page is mainly for their readers who want to know more about the artists which appear in the publication.

Eh gads... going onto 4AM. Jean will be getting up soon and I'll just be getting to bed. That's not uncommon actually. Two ships passing in the night.

Anything Worthwhile Takes Time & Money

2009-06-28T20:38:00.000-07:00

Can't believe it took over two weeks to put together an exhibition proposal! You can see the PDF here. Sorry, it is almost 8 Meg in size so if you have a slow connection maybe it is time for a coffee break.

I still need to send it off to have the prints made, then package the prints up in a nifty leather bound portfolio, and send the proposal off for consideration. Forty Eight prints at $3.80 each plus the portfolio and shipping and the project totals out to around $230.

Small investment I guess if you believe in your work, but man this art stuff is a money pit! My printer blew up on me doing some test prints. I put all new ink cartridges in thinking I just needed new ink, because I haven't used the printer in a while and the 'head cleaning' process wasn't clearing up the problem. After the new ink was in place the printer totally stopped printing. :(

In true DIY style I found a web site that explained that this is a common problem with my printer and explained how to fix it.

Regretfully, this turned into a big mess... literally. There was a huge amount of ink all over the place in the printer due to disconnected ink hoses, and I couldn't see anything in the jet black ink drenched interior only accessible via needle nose pliers.

I gave up after a couple hours. So not only did I waste putting new ink on the dead printer ($60), I also now need to buy a new printer and a new set of cartridges. That will be another several hundred dollars. In quick order I'm well over $500 for the weekend! Ouch!

At least I'm one step closer to actually being able to move onto new projects. I'm very excited about doing more powder painting and combining that with enameling and photography. This is really going to be fun.

I'll probably get the proposal out to the folks at the Minneapolis Institute of Art by next Friday after the prints come back from White House Custom Color... then I'll be free just to play!

My mother always said in a sing-song voice... Jimmy's whole world is P-L-A-Y... I can only aspire to her vision for me.

Incredible the concentration page layout work takes. So many details.

I'm dead tired and need a weekend to recover from my weekend.

Still Obsessing

2009-06-06T11:08:00.001-07:00

It is the beginning June and it is still cold enough here in Minnesota to see the steam rise from my coffee. Last Wednesday there was a hard frost up north and a lot of tomato plants were probably unhappy.

This week’s Designs for Good focus is back on my Circular Obsessions sculpture series. I’ve created a catalog layout for the series using Adobe’s InDesign. You can view the catalog here. The plan is to use the document as the center piece of my marketing campaign with the goals of getting the series shown in an upscale venue as part of a charitable event. The works of art (mine and potentially other artists) will act as ‘gifts’ for significant donation levels.

Simple enough idea, but as I’m learning the execution will be challenging. The reactions from those I’ve talked to vary wildly from “what bad karma are you working off’ to comments which you would expect like "that is a very generous idea". Then there are the practical concerns of how the funds might be collected and if there are any legal issues with collecting charitable contributions.

The first reaction from most artists is (and rightfully so) "who has the time and money to offer their work" and why should they if they are unsure about where the money goes. So my first thought was to insure the money went to other artists.

As mentioned in the last post I talked to a CERF (Craft Emergency Relief Fund) representative over the phone, but haven't heard back from them. I didn't get a warm and fuzzy feeling during our conversation. Seems getting involved upfront in a project to raise funds via an idea like mine isn't something they typically do. It is more typical for them just to receive funds after someone has had some sort of fund raiser.

OK, I'll come closer to home. The Minneapolis Institute of Art has a program for local artists called MAEP which stands for Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program. Hmmm... so why not put on a show whose goal is to raise money for MAEP. In the last edition of the museum's quarterly they introduced Christopher Atkins as the new Coordinator of the program and it states "He looks forward to brainstorming with the MAEP panel for ways to respond nimbly to economic constraints."

This looks promising right? So I think I'll have my propaganda printed up, add a cover letter and see what he thinks of the idea. There may be very good reasons why it won't work, but I'm not aware of them at the moment. People donate to museums all the time. I'm just taking a hint from public radio and suggesting that we give a gift (a work of art) for a donation on a certain level.

I would like for other artists to participate by donating some work (and by the way obtain some high quality exposure), but I am willing to fill a small gallery with enough work myself if necessary, and I'm flexible enough I think to work through other issues.

I'm very curious to see what Christopher's response will be. Hopefully he can give me some advice regarding a better approach should this idea not be a fit.

First things first. I have to complete the propaganda and get it printed.

Portfolio Photography

2009-05-31T16:31:00.000-07:00

This weeks Designs For Good adventure finds me doing portfolio shots for a local sculptor. It's true that anyone can take a decent picture these days, but portfolio shots are a category of photography that take a bit more equipment than your typical point-and-shoot with built in flash.
In the case of portfolio shots - a picture is worth a thousand... dollars, more or less. Excellent photography sets the artist apart, and can be the pass key to entering and even winning competitions.

My Circular Obsessions series will get national recognition through Sculpture Pursuit magazine based on photography alone.

A lot of artists simply cannot afford to pay a professional photographer who may charge several hundred dollars just to shoot one sculpture. I belong to the Society of Minnesota Sculptors and I offered my photography expertise for our members. A few have taken me up on my offer. It can take 6-10 hours to do a good job on a work of art.

OK, maybe I'm just slow. But getting to know the work, and playing with the studio lighting takes time as does all the post processing touch ups. Maybe I'm just picky or just like to play.
Early in my artistic life I hired a professional photographer on two occasions. In both cases I got a great exposure, but no feeling. The images were lackluster and lacked atmosphere.

It's not too hard to get a good exposure, but it takes time to build an atmosphere, yielding as sense of drama. You can take it too far though. I was tempted to put blue-green gels on the lights to accent the waves for the first picture above. After all it is bronze with a green patina, and a little blue cast would make the bronze more water-like. That is half of the challenge though. You can' t pull out all the tricks in the bag. You have to stay true to the object if the image is to represent what someone may want to buy, yet you need to make them want to buy it. Just a little tricky.

A few of each shot will go into portfolios and many will be posted on the web, helping to promote the artist's career. Helping the society's members helps me build a portfolio also. Shooting artwork is challenging and fun. Sometimes there is a single best shot that describes the feel of the work. Finding that shot could be the difference between selling a piece and having it passed over by a jury for a show.

These two works were a bit challenging for different reasons. The bottom image is an artist's interpretation of the Indian Goddess Kali. The top shot is of a woman riding out a wave on a beach. It isn't easy getting the angle right so the waves look wave-like, the smile is caught, the background doesn't interfere, and there isn't an inopportune shadow. Just moving this shot one step to the right and it looks like the subject's neck is hanging over a guillotine. Needless to say, not what the artist had in mind.

It is fun to play with the images as in the one to the left, and the artist may even like your playing around, but that is what it is - the photographer playing around and having fun.

This is where portfolio shots start to mutate into graphic design. This image could be used on the artist literature or website as a very graphic element to draw a viewer in, but it is obviously not representational.

Maybe I should start a photographic series of my interpretations of artist's interpretations of something else. Maybe I'll call it Adaptive Interpretations.

Or... maybe for now I'll keep my open invitation to our sculpture society for doing more of their pieces, as long as it remains fun.

Creativity & Collaboration

2009-05-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

In the post Why Designs For Good I discussed some motivational factors for giving my work or the proceeds from sales to nonprofit organizations. I stated that this act of giving is in no way selfless or some sort of bleeding heart liberal indulgence. Today's post is an example of receiving far more in return through the act of giving, and being open to 'outside' influences in your creative life.

Just the opposite of that openness is my Circular Obsess ions series was a truly obsessively driven singular pursuit of realizing an inner vision by minimizing outside influences. This inner vision came with a set of very restricting standards the sum of which is hard to explain, but I'll list a few for discussion sake.

Color was fairly restricted
Almost all surfaces had to have unique texturing
The disparate media types had to have a seamless integrated look
Each piece in the series had to have at least two glass styles: cast glass, kilnworked glass or torchworked

There were many other criteria which I had little control over. Things just either looked and felt right or they didn't. The object 'resonated' or it didn't. When working with/through this inner vision thing you can't talk yourself into a compromise. If it isn't right it just isn't right, and no amount of rationalization will work to change that.

And what I mean by criteria which I had little control over will need to be a subject of another post. For now, just ask yourself.. what is my favorite color, and do you know why? Or why do some people like abstracts and others do not? Suffice it to say that on some very fundamental level we do not control our preferences for certain types of sensation, and my posit - as it pertains to my inner vision thingee - is that it was more in control of me than I in control of its driving aesthetic preferences.

At times I would obsess for a month over how to best hide a seam between two components. In extreme cases it may take over six months to get a glass component both structurally sound and aesthetically 'correct', with many failures along the way.

Working under these conditions is a sort of aesthetic tyranny, which you accept as the process of creation, but it can become oppressive as it seeks an end result which seems continually out of reach.

Needless to say, in this mindset outside influences such as: will it sell; what gallery will show it; or even the basic financial concern of the cost of production versus potential of return are not in consideration. All of which serves to illustrate the somewhat irrational aspects of the inner vision thing.

After completing the Circular Obsessions odyssey I turned my sculpture studio into a photography studio and really didn't have a plan for glass into the future, until I was invited to teach kilnformed glass at Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center (CAFAC), and then some odd things started to happen.

This inner vision thing relentlessly pursued its end and thereby eliminated whole sets of creative potential. Even within the glass area I was restricted to a certain look which eliminated almost everything else in glass except 'the look'.

When I opened myself to 'give' my time to CAFAC the whole world of glass opened back up to me. In short order I found Powder Painting, created an extensive array of art glass tiles which I will be marketing, and most recently have begun experiments in enameling.

This is a copper foil lotus flower I recently prototyped as a small part of a collaborative sculpture which will help illustrate CAFAC's multi media emphasis. It is an example of how glass and metal can be integrated into a single work of art, and what students can learn at the Fire Arts Center.

Being primarily a glass artist I struggled for many weeks trying to make glass flowers, and they always looked.... well like glass flowers. They didn't fit the overall feel of the sculpture which is a collection of found objects mostly of metal.

The final lotus flowers could have multiple layers of petals where the lower layers of petals are only slightly enameled showing mostly copper, and thereby integrating into the largely metal sculpture.

OK, maybe I was just ripe for doing new things after completing Circular Obsessions, and maybe I just needed to get out more instead of being all wrapped up in the inner vision thingee.

That's true, but it was the opening up and the giving away in powerful combination which has totally changed how I now approach my work, and who I am as a creative person. I can see now that collaboration will be a key factor in setting directions, and collaboration will provide a rich open field of creative adventures which will far outstripped what I could have imagined before.

Giving my work away will open doors and provide advantages not available to the lone wolf artist I was. And again, nothing is really being given away. Materials must be paid for from the proceeds, and there are obviuos returns in the form of marketing and publicity.

My goal is to maximize the proceeds so that significant funds are generated for a nonprofit, and as discussed in other posts, that is not a simple process. To that end I will be contacting organizations like the Craft Emergency Relief Fund (CERF) for their assistance and advice, and potentially to organize an event for the sale of Circular Obsessions to benefit CERF.

One last note... Enameling is very expensive, especially on a large scale. A large panel of 30x40 inches may take several hundred dollars of enamel powder. So, being a glass artist and having just discovered Powder Painting for myself.... hmmm, can I enamel with my glass powders which are far cheaper than those wee little jars of enamels? Can I make 30x40 enamel panels with Bullseye glass?

Sure.. why not... stay tuned.

Macro Manipulations

2009-05-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

As with any of my projects there are usually multiple stages of design and iterations within each stage. The photography stage wasn't too difficult. A macro lens with good studio flashes permitted a small aperture of f32, yielding a decent depth of field (DOF). Since my subject was held flat with a piece of glass DOF was not as critical and difficult to maintain as 3D subjects. I might go back to the studio to use a single side flash to bring out the texture of the scales on the wing.

For now, I'm satisfied with the images and have progressed onto abstracting them using Photoshop, Lightroom, and other plugins. The detailing, color gradations and hue and tonal variations are critical since the final prints will be 20x30 in size. I'm going for a Chuck Close Meets Impressionism style where at a distance things look somewhat normal, but you are drawn into the image with an ever deepening realization of the detail.

You have to imagine the image at left being 20x30 inches and the 3rd image down being what you see when you walk up c lose.... Chuck :)

Having the DOF just right accounts for much of the detailing. You can see every scale on the wing, pieces of dust, dirt and hairs, and collectively these produce the texture, hue and tonal gradations that hold your interest. If the images were not sharply focused the detailing would be lost and the gradations and textures would become large uninteresting patches with few color shifts.

I put these images and other butterflies on my site where you can use a Zoom tool (similar to MapQuest) letting you zoom in and out of the images.

I will most likely go through several iterations of composition and design styles, but that is not the hard part. Nor should the printing be difficult if the final images are fantastic.

The challenge will be to see if certain unknown judges will still consider this photography? I would like to use the final images as part of a grant competition in photography. This is a highly subjective and almost philosophical question. What do you think? Are these photographs?

To be honest, I really can't tell you, and anyone that does have a qualified answer is simply working from a particular aesthetic or technical context. That is, judging from a certain frame of reference. The question is as nebulous as what is art, what is fine art, and when does craft become art?

Is the first image a photograph that is just colored funny and the last one is not because it is too abstracted? Are very grainy black and white images not photography because the grain (an aesthetic quality) is not realistic? Many people don't believe photography is art and maybe that is the rub of these photographs.

What do you think? Are these art?

Along with my lifelong predisposition to dislike self promotion is my dislike of labels in the arts. Regretfully, the reality is that labels and who is labeling does indeed matter, and can profoundly affect you and how you approach your work... if you let it.

My answer to all of that is Designs For Good where I simply make stuff, sell it for enough profit to pay for materials, and forward the proceeds to a good cause. That is a simple model to avoid a lot of the distractions the art world imposes on its participants.

However, even with that there are many practical concerns and questions like how can I maximize the proceeds, or, if you want grant money you have to play by the rules, their rules.

Backing up 10,000 feet. All of the above is really about values - what and how, we and other cultures, value certain activities and objects. Values and categories are closely intertwined.

For now, this post must come to an end, leaving the discussion of values for another time or better just left to philosophers.

You might think it would be simple just to give stuff away. But not really. Not if you want more of a result than just throwing all your money off of the tallest building in town.

I value my time/work more than that.

Macro Lepidoptera

2009-05-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

As mentioned I have been working on the initial phases of several projects for Designs for Good and have taken the first steps on a new effect. But I’ll digress with some back-story first.

I have been attracted to butterflies since childhood. Some of the boys in the neighborhood would spend an afternoon catching them at our ball field on hot summer afternoons when we weren’t playing baseball. The ball field had a small wooded area over the homerun fence, and it was there we would sit for hours on end waiting to see those dashing flights of color.

We posted ourselves apart so that we could visually survey our several acre hunting ground and waited in the heat; waiting for one of us to scream Monarch! Tiger! or on rare occasion Zebra! Then we would be off at break-neck speed, leaping over gullies, dodging trees and brush, and squeezing through fences holes while swinging our nets to catch the prize.

That continued for several years and we amassed a collection of several hundred specimens. We learned about relaxing jars, killing jars, and how to properly prepare and mount the winged wonders. Our parish priest was a stogie-loving man and saved his Marsh Wheeling cigar boxes for us to store our prizes. My father worked at the HJ Heinz factory and (for whatever reason) he was able to obtain carbon tetrachloride to use in our killing jars. Today it is known for its adverse health effects. That was apparent to us young boys because it killed the insects in seconds once in the jar.

I’m old enough now that those times seem like someone else’s life. My color fixation today is focused mostly on glass and photography, but I have never forgotten my first color addiction. In my wanderlust years well over 30 years ago I found myself walking the tobacco lined back roads of Kentucky, and was struck by the large number of road-kill butterflies on the roadside. I collected the samples and put them in a jar with mothballs for preservation. The shots here are from those samples.

I used my Nikon 2DXs with a Nikor 105mm macro lens to capture these shots. Two studio flashes were used on either side for even lighting and the camera was mounted directly over the subject on a tripod. Little else was done to the images except a little ‘clarity’ and contrast added in Adobe’s Lightroom.

For my new project I’ll start with a clean set of macro images from a properly maintained collection without the dust and tears of my roadside collection. Then the fun will begin as I run the images though whatever strikes my fancy in my image-editing arsenal. The end product will be highly abstracted (as if macro wasn’t abstract enough) images ready for art prints.

I’ve been looking for an excuse to purchase Nikon’s on-lens wireless macro flash unit (R1), and this is the project for that. So now I can look like those CSI guys on TV.

I’m also tempted to rent a Nikon D3x for the project since I’ll then have a 24MP file to work with. My intention is to print these images poster size and larger, and will likely crop each images during final composition. This will leave me at least 12-18 MP to work with.

Now for the Designs for Good part of this.

The art prints will be sold and the profits will benefit a good cause. I haven’t identified a target organization yet because that will be the easy part and there are a lot of steps to complete first.

Dr. Richard Vogt of the University of South Carolina has graciously consented to allow me access to the Richard B. Dominic collection housed in the McKissick Museum. Information regarding this collection can be found at http://zebra.sc.edu/moth.html.

Now I have access to a collection and the technical and artistic aspects are mostly under control. I will need to focus on the business and marketing aspects of the project. Large art prints are expensive to produce, especially if I’m driven aesthetically to print on media such as cloth, vinyl or canvas. Ideally, a pre-production funding source should be secured.

I’ll be applying for several grants. This year the Minnesota State Arts Board is offering an Artist Initiative Grant in photography. The grants range from two to six thousand dollars. That’s a nice chunk of change which would help with equipment, travel, and production costs. I’ll look into other grants as well.

It’s time to start the process of finding Designs for Good sponsors. To be realistic I’ll have to accomplish a few projects on my own before any company or organization will consider a limited stipend. But it’s time to start that process.

Getting the prints in front of the public shouldn’t be a major hurdle, but the main idea is to raise money for charity, not to show art prints. I’m exploring options and have a grandiose idea of showing them at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (I seldom aim low). The MIA has a program designed for local artists and I’m hoping to fit into that program. The idea is to create a significant pool of money for a cause. The prints are merely an opportunity for patrons of a major institution to contribute and receive a very unique ‘gift’ in return.

Galleries seem hit or miss to me and are not my preferred approach. Various web-based marketing opportunities are also an option. At this point however I’m very optimistic that a museum or art center will be open to the idea.

So, there you go. Along with the CAFAC effort this starts the second Designs for Good project.

Relections On The Cost Of Design

2009-04-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

OMG! The cost of Adobe's Creative Suite graphic design package is just too much, or is it? No, actually it isn't, because what you obtain is a whole integrated package which will enable a graphic designer, web master, photographer, and videographer to create absolutely amazing work sometimes with a push of a few buttons.

I made the commitment this weekend and bought the Master Package... ouch! And along with it bought packages from Topaz and Photomatrix. The images below are from outside my studio today. It is raining so I knew the wet ground and car would make an excellent subject. The reflections are great.

You can see the out-of-the-camera image (top) and the lower one after just a few minutes in the Topaz products. The latter has much more graphic impact and was accomplished in just a few minutes. If it were to be used in a Subaru ad I would have made the logo more prominent, toned down the purpleness of the building, and would do a little vignetting.

Product shots like cars are all about reflections and using light to mold the form of the car. In this case it was a cloudy and rainy day and perfect for creating the type reflections needed to bring contrast and detailing together. It isn't real intuitive, but some subjects actually look better on an overcast day. If you ever visit a photographer's studio you'll see that their lights are covered by large things called softboxes. These 'boxes' soften the light, and significantly change the characteristics of the highlights, just like clouds do to the sun. You'll learn that in lighting 101 classes. Then you add in the magic of your image editing software and then you have an image worth some money..... to someone.

It was a reflective day for me. It is a cold rainy spring day in Savage Minnesota. Sitting within the screened porch, covered with a blanket, a cat on top of that, and a cup of coffee warming my chilled hands.... I sat letting thoughts drift. While listening to the seemingly wistful spring call of chickadees and morning doves in the distance I felt the soft soaking rain in the air around me.

A mist of heat rose from my coffee cup which warmed my cold and stiffened fingers, and I wondered what exactly was I going to use these expensive tools for. My problem has always been that I think in terms too large for my own good. Like the project that Brian and I are discussing for example (see prior posts).

I have a few ideas for Designs For Good which are too new to even post about. It will be good, good for me and whatever good comes to others through my meandering and wanderings of how to best apply the skills given to me.

It is very rare I thought.... as I heard a call of a Loon coming from our creek below. The call echoed about the step hillsides framing the creek's valley, and faded back again into the sound of gentle rain. It must be on its way from the southern home to one of Minnesota's ten thousand lakes I thought. And yesterday I saw a Cedar Waxwing for the first time in over tens years of living here. It too on its way up north to replenish itself. The travel north is one of the most dangerous times for migratory birds.

We must invest ourselves to be replenished.

And tomorrow is Monday and back to reality in my 9 to 5.

I'm On the Cover of Rolling Stone!

2009-04-19T21:49:00.001-07:00

Well, not really. My work has been chosen to be on the cover of Sculptural Pursuit magazine which like Rolling Stone for sculptors. I'm very excited and honored. The series I've titled Circular Obsessions has been in the making for many years. Hard to say when it really started. I guess like most artists it takes half a life time to form your aesthetic vocabulary, and the other half you might actually make something interesting.

The short of it is, I'm just attracted to round shapes in both two and three dimensions, and these form the core of my vernacular. When I approached color studies in glass I used the sphere as my form. To create the majority of the work a lathe was used as a natural tool for creating the family of rounded shapes. The lathe enabled me to prototype from sketches fairly quickly. I'd work pine to get the shape right, then turn the final pieces in various solid-surface materials like Corina. These materials don't suffer from expansion and contraction and grain issues. I love wood, but not for this series.

Many of the original turned pieces where subsequently cast in bronze, some were copper plated, and few cherry wood items where stained black and coated with powdered silicon carbide to match the dark patina of the finished metal pieces.

The glass spheres and kilnformed glass elements bring color and textural contrast to the finished works. Putting it simply and straight forward, the form of the sculptures are elaborate housings for the jewels of glass.

The image above is the one chosen to be on the cover of the issue due out later this year. It is called Aeon. Most of the works have short names that kind of relate to the the work, but I don't agonize over the meaning behind the names. You can see all of the sculptures here.

We completed the telephone interview for the article this weekend. Marilyn Noble, the managing editor allowed me talk her ear off. I sent a follow up email to apologize for the running monologue. It's not that often that I talk about my work. I'm usually just buried in the studio making stuff.

I guess I have been getting out more lately though. I dropped off a delivery of finished art glass panels to Heather Doyle who is one of the founding members of the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center (CAFAC see Related Links). She will be creating metal frames to complete the wall hangings. Heather will be teaching metal working at CAFAC, and it will be wonderful for me to teach and collaborate there when it opens later this year.

I'll be working with Heather and her students to create frames for the wall hangings and other sculpture pieces. The goal is to place the pieces in galleries and hopefully on permanent display to raise awareness and funds (when sold) for CAFAC. The work will be examples of what can be done by students when they come to CAFAC.

The powder painting image posted in a previous blog post and this image below will be examples of works which we will placed in galleries, and can actually be done by a student in one weekend class.

I also met with Brian Madson (as mentioned in prior posts) and we had our first discussion on the practicalities and barriers to creating a nonprofit media center. I was really impressed with his experience level. He has worked many media projects for some of the largest nonprofits in the country.

I can see at this point that Brian and I have our work cut out for us, and we'll need to take careful steps along this journey.

I also made two trips to J Ring Glass over the weekend to satisfy my addiction to glass. J Ring is the largest art glass supplier in the upper Midwest. They set the record for their largest single-day store sales this last Saturday. Given the recession we are in that was surprising to hear - I just had to help in breaking the record! Any excuse will do to buy glass!

And I did find some exciting glass. Bullseye is continually expanding their line. They created this ultra blue iridescent glass which I'm really excited about.

Why Designs for Good?

2009-04-14T15:44:00.000-07:00

The main difficulty I have had in my creative ventures is the whole area of self promotion. I didn't realize it early on, but it was one of the reasons that I didn't finish my studies in the fine arts. I had very mixed feelings about going to art openings, meeting the right people, belonging to the right clique, bantering about talking about myself, then graduating and having to make a go of it by constantly thinking of ways to draw attention.

Yes, that's a fairly negative summary of what self promotion means, after all we all must promote ourselves in our careers no matter what the field. In my technical career as a database administrator I have no qualms about self promotion. Being out front with my technical skills is largely why I have had a good technical career.

Doing the same with my creative skills is another matter for me. I could go on to list a series of reasons why it is different. But for brevity sake Designs for Good is the resolution of my lifelong quandary regarding self promotion. My various talents become utilitarian by using them to promote a worthy cause.

My photography and graphic designs skills can become communication devices, my artwork can be sold to raise funds, my web and technical knowledge can be used to help an organization more effectively use technology.

This isn't some sort of selfless act of giving. I'm not a bleeding heart liberal. My skills are a gift to me. Some of what I do is so effortless yet the results can be at times quite exceptional. The energy flows in, and now I'm looking for it to flow out just as easily. It is not selfless because I have experienced that through the act of opening up and giving you do indeed get more than you give.

This act of giving and receiving in return is not limited to the physical exchange of some product between myself and my 'client'. As a matter of fact, that is not what I'm talking about at all. That is just the very end result. What I'm referring to is the act of receiving greater creative energy by not holding onto it, but rather letting it flow out in directions that you are not exactly controlling.

I firmly believe that our deeply creative moments are a realization or materialization or manifestation of that which is larger than ourselves. We do not know where in-spiration comes from, where conceptualization is born in us. Ideas just happen; creativity expands who you are when you suddenly see what you did not before, when you master a technique and do what you or possibly no one has done before.

Where does that come from? Surly we lay the ground work by years of practice and study, but the breakthrough moment is a gift.

Again, I could go into a lot of detail on the exact nature of what this 'flow' is and how it benefits me to give it away and not control it, but I'll keep this post short.

For me Designs for Good is my way of dealing with self promotion in a manner that frees me from being self conscious and there by not limiting or possibly disabling my creative potential.

I am not exactly sure where I am going in this venture. I have started out with the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center. Then there is this idea of a nonprofit media services company that needs a lot of work. I’m sure I will be doing smaller projects along the way.

The journey can now start now that the self promotion bugaboo is in a jar.

Hello World!

2009-04-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

Funny, I do actually remember having my first Pascal program's output say 'Hello World!" all those years ago on my Apple //c.

This blog was created to share my many adventures in the arts and graphic design. I'll be posting or linking to how-to projects as they are created. For instance, I'm currently excited about the technique I'm calling powder painting, and will be posting advice on how to create your own masterpieces :) You can see more examples at my site.

For those who like hands-on education I'll be teaching the technique at the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center (CAFAC) later this year, as well as basic kilnformed glass techniques.

On the more serious side of this blog I will be exploring the use my various graphic art, photography, web, and other skills to aid nonprofit organizations. CAFAC (an official NPO) is one of my first forays and there will be more.

I recently met up with Brian Madson who has years of Marketing & Communications experience and apparently we both have been thinking the same thought. That is, to start a media services company which is a nonprofit itself, and whose mission is to serve other nonprofits. This is a very involved idea and the development of the idea will be the source of many posts here.

By chance I met up with Brian via the Minnesota Nonprofit Counsel. I submitted my idea to them and as you might expect they also knew Brian was exploring this idea and they put 2 and 2 together. That's networking, and that is why I started this blog. There is no telling who will cross this path when walking the Internet.

So there you have it. My first blog post.