addendum, oppressive heat, flowers

Sort of an addendum to my last post. It wasn’t easy this path we chose. At first there was no market because architectural etched glass wasn’t a thing. We had to create the market by cold calling interior designers and architects and doing presentations to introduce them to the possibilities of this medium. We often worked seven days a week. There were plenty of times when we would go several months with no work. We never had health insurance and are fortunate that we and our kids were basically healthy. We lived hand to mouth. Any money we managed to save was always spent. It was very stressful either because we had no work or too much work at one time but even so we were making one of a kind original art that had/has the possibility of enduring long after we’re gone and the satisfaction of seeing a commission go from thumbnail sketch to finished installed work never got old so at no time did we ever really consider quitting and getting jobs as some self employed artists eventually did. But then there came a time when we did. The stress from doing two enormous corporate jobs back to back was too much, our relationship was in the toilet and we were headed for separation if not divorce. We had enough money saved from those two jobs to last about a year and we just couldn’t do it anymore. Of our two employees, one had already quit and we let the other go. We focused on getting our shit together for the next year and a half until our financial situation became dire and then we started over, just the two of us like in the beginning because really, we had become basically unemployable in our own minds by that time. This time we kept it small focusing mainly on high end residential and some corporate work. During this time we also developed our pate de verre technique, a lost wax glass casting process but that’s another post. We retired from the etched glass at the end of 2017 when the house flooded from Hurricane Harvey. There were other reasons; our contacts were aging out or dying, architectural decorative glass had really evolved offering other alternatives, it was physically demanding on our own aging bodies, and we were just plain tired of the whole thing; but that was the impetus. It still amazes me how much we produced out of our little two car garage studio.

If you are interested in seeing more of the work we did, here are links to two pages on our website (which btw is seriously outdated and contains broken and missing links that I was in the middle of renovating when I got the new computer two years ago and the program I used to upload images and text no longer worked and I’ve lost interest in buying the updated software because we’re not doing glass at all anymore). This one links to images and information about those commissions. The list of residential work is only a tiny fraction of what we did. This one is just a portfolio of images that shows a lot more of the residential work. Some jobs I don’t have pictures of, most were really hard to photograph because my only chance was right after installation and either too much or not enough light.    

Ok, enough of that.

It’s been so hot. July hot. Highs in the mid 90s with high humidity which pushes the feels like about 10 degrees hotter though we're supposed to get a little relief later in the week. Still stuff has to be done. I set the sprinkler up Sunday, hand watered Saturday. I cut the wisteria back one day and hauled it to the burn pile another day, cut back the low hanging branches of a tree and wild grape vine in back of the shop. That stuff is still lying where it fell. Another big branch fell from the pecan tree that was so heavily damaged last summer in the hurricane which took me two days to cut and pile up and then today I saw another big branch had fallen out of the farther most pecan tree.

But it’s not all sweaty labor. I've been working on the dwarf pomegranate painting (4" x 4"). It would help if I could decide on where the light source is and stop changing my mind.

I got to spend time with Paisleigh and Harrison on Sunday and put up another 18 ears of corn. That should be enough for the year. And stuff is blooming. The double orange daylilies are in full bloom, the crinum lilies seem to have popped up overnight, and one of the yellow bells has a cluster of flowers.

And the plumerias are blooming.