10. and bust

Since I am so busy right now and with this two hours of commuting every day (an hour each way), I have no time to blog and am getting behind on reading.  So if I don’t comment that’s why.

Here’s another installment of how I became a glass artist.  As usual, if you want to read the previous installments, click here .  They are mostly short and remember to read from the bottom up if you want to start at the beginning.

10.  and bust

In the mid 80s, the bottom dropped out of the economy in Houston and our stained glass tenant moved to Colorado so we couldn’t afford to keep the building.  About the same time, our neighbor put her house up for sale and we decided to buy it.  The payments were less than the rent on the studio.  The extra house became studio space for the design part of our work and the old studio (the two car garage) became the fabrication part.  All those contacts I had nurtured for so many years, the big architectural firms, paid off during this time.  As these firms closed their offices in Houston (we actually lost population during this time), they took us with them as a resource to their new locations.  One day I flew into the DC area to give a presentation to the design section where a contact had moved to, and then flew out the same day.  Others went to the west coast and so we got a lot good jobs on both coasts but they were not very creative designwise.  With a few exceptions, it devolved into geometrics or ‘glass wallpaper ’ as Marc called it.