13. starting over

It's been a while since I posted an installment of 'becoming a glass artist'. You can review, or if you haven't read it you can catch up here. Be sure to read from the bottom up for chronological order...

In 1994 we started running out of money and had to go back to work. I found myself making cold calls and trips to designers’ offices to promote our work and studio again, trying to reconnect with or forge new relationships. Designers who I had done work for in the past had moved on to other vendors. Designers who I had pissed off in the past gave me the cold shoulder. The folly of focusing on architects to spec work in the past came home to me. We made new contacts, re-established some others and begged trolled for work. Now that we were not supporting employees our income needs were different and slowly work started trickling back in but still, we teetered on the edge for several years.

The best thing that came out of that time was that we decided to learn how to do the pate de verre technique of casting glass after seeing pictures of the work done in the late 19^th century in France and also the work of Doug Anderson in the 70s. We wanted something to do for ourselves, something where we had only ourselves to please. We learned that Dan Fenton (a very knowledgeable fellow on glass casting techniques) was in town doing a workshop at a local stained glass supply, he had a week to kill til his next commitment so we arranged, with a friend, to have him do a private workshop for us and a few others. Mostly what he taught us was how to make frit (crushed glass that is essential to the pate de verre technique) but he also allowed us to connect some dots in our own knowledge. There is a detailed tutorial/explanation of this technique on this page of our website.

We spent the next two or three years making frit, experimenting with mold materials, casting small hearts and other shapes, learning to work in wax. We used cheap crystal from K-Mart, we made frit from fusible sheet glass, we bought cheap fusible frit from a company in California but their supply was iffy. We tried out kiln schedules and kilns we borrowed or built. We bought any books we could find that had even related material to what we wanted to do. We dedicated Fridays and weekends to this pursuit. Eventually we felt accomplished enough and started making small bowls, 6” x 3”, using the lost wax technique, reproduction molds and two part press molds. Fortunately around this time, Bullseye Glass, who made the fusible sheet glass we had, started selling fusible frit. I say fortunately because if we had had to continue making our own frit we probably would not have continued to pursue this technique.

12. and bust again

Alix over at Casa Hice asked me this after one of my more recent posts on this thread and I’ve decided to answer it here:  Do you love what you do? Or do the deadlines and demands stress you out?...I’d have to say that mostly I love what I do.  Although there were several years in there (as described in this post and the previous installment) that I pretty much hated it.  It was nothing BUT stress during those years.  Now, though, now I do love it.  I love to make things, to work with my hands, to have an idea and construct it.  Mostly I am happy with the result, sometimes all I see are the flaws and sometimes I amaze even myself.  But it’s not usually the end result that I work for.  It’s the process.  That said, it can get stressful when I have more work than I can do and make everybody happy about how long it takes them to get their job.  It is also stressful when we don’t have enough work...will a job come in before our meager savings run out?  When I was younger and we didn’t have any work, I would make cold calls to designers and architects to sell ourselves.  I really hated that and eventually quit doing it.  If things got desperate, then I’d just go out and get a job.  Haven’t ever had to do that yet but there was a year or two when I actually applied for a job.  Funny thing though, when you have been self employed doing something so specialized for as long as we have, you basically become unemployable unless, of course, you want to work at Walmart or a fast food joint.

My friend John Kurman’s recent post on Random Walks is sort of about this same thing...fun/not fun.  While working this past week, spending the last four days laminating about 550 jewels (of which a little less than half had already had dicroic glass glued to it and ground smooth) to the window behind the altar of a chapel we had lots of visitors pop in when they would notice us working.  At one point during the week, a lady came in and asked me if it was fun.  Fun?!  Lady, this is work, I'm up on a friggin' 12' ladder!  But now that it's done?  Yeah, it was fun.  Well, maybe not fun exactly, as Reya said (see comments below) satisfying.

so, continuing (and as usual, if you are new here or haven’t yet read the whole story, click here and read from the bottom up)...

By 1992 (our kids were 15 and 13 by then), the bottom was falling out of our lives.  Our first employee, the one who had taken over all the actual sandblasting, and Marc never did really get along and the tension between them became worse and worse over the years until he finally quit in the middle of a big job, 5 floors of an interior wall system that surrounded the central elevator shafts.  And on top of that the stress was doing both of us in.  One day I found myself yelling at one of the local designers who had come by to talk about a job we had done for her that had a small problem.  Marc and I were constantly at each other’s throats, were on the verge (maybe even over the line a little bit) of the three ‘Ds’...drink, drugs and divorce.  We were taking weekends away from each other (this is when I started the river guide gig). As soon as we finished that last big job with the help of a friendly competitor, we basically quit.  We let our other two employees go and took a year off while we repaired our lives.  That year turned into nearly two before we were finally able to go back to work in earnest.  Every penny we had left from the big money days, we spent those two years and in the ensuing years while we started our business back up.

11. and boom again

Sunbank, Orlando FL

I guess the picture from my last chapter really belongs with this installment.  Of all that work we did out of town and out of state (of which you will read about below), this is the only one of those jobs that we have pictures of and only because we drove to Orlando to see it and then we took our kids to Disneyworld.

re the glass wallpaper...Nice to look at, but oh, such drudgery.  Not to mention having to deal with contractors who didn't know and didn't care that it was a handmade product, not something stored in a warehouse somewhere.  They had their schedules!  Not that we were late but that didn't stop them from calling nearly every damn day and being assholes.

Remember, if you haven’t read the story from the beginning, go here and as usual read from the bottom up for chronological order.

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After the bottom fell out of Houston in the mid-80s, my nurtured relationships with the design staffs at the big architectural firms started to pay off.  As mentioned before, these contacts moved to the east and west coasts in the latter half of the 80s when their regional offices closed.  We started getting detailed in the plans and I had to learn how to read blueprints.  Once we were specified in the plans, contractors remembered us when other jobs that specified etched glass came in.  We did over 1,000 identical 3’ x 3’ panels that made up an interior wall system for Sunbank in Florida, we did conference room walls on seven floors of a building in Atlanta (another bank I think), we did law offices on the east coast, medical facilities in Houston, an office building and a college in NY, retail work on the west coast and Las Vegas.  We were so busy, we couldn’t get it all done.  We were getting $50,000  to $100,000 jobs and the big money got our attention.  We pissed off more than one local designer by being late with their one or two panels.  

What we needed to do was to get a small business loan, get a bigger place and hire more people.  We were poised to be able to become a big business.  We had the know how and the contacts.  Except that we didn’t really want to be a big business.  We had already put on two more employees so now we had three.  It was becoming less about the work and more about keeping them busy.  Plus the money.  The art had been lost long ago, I wasn’t doing any of the designing and we had become a fabrication shop.  We made a pretty good living during those years.  We paid off both mortgages, bought a new car and a new truck, put some money away in investments (which we eventually lost in the various stock market crashes), took actual real vacations but we worked hard.  After the day shift went home and we got the kids homeworked, fed and in bed, Marc and I would put in another 3 or 4 hours.

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.

9. boom

Time for another installment of ‘how I became a glass artist’.  You can read them all in sequential order here but you have to read from the bottom up.  

Back in the early 80s there was a lot of oil money around and the oil companies were good clients as were the country clubs and racquet clubs.  We were doing well enough by that time to put the kids in a preschool program for half a day and take on a part time employee.  By 1983, we needed to expand our work space so we rented a building three blocks away.  It was an old grocery store that had been vacant for some time.  It was really a great space though, glass across the front with very high ceilings and high windows along the sides with an apartment upstairs that we used for office space and a conference room.  It’s also where we parked the kids in the afternoon while we were working downstairs.  We rented part of the space to a stained glass worker (not our friend Gene who had his own studio) and in ‘84, a glass blower joined us.  He built a small furnace in the back space behind a wall so for a while, we had quite a little glass art center going.

Our part-timer had quit soon after we moved into the building but one day a guy walked in looking for a job.  He was currently working for his uncle who was one of our competitors.  We weren’t actually looking for an employee at that time but his etching skills were pretty good so we agreed to a couple of weeks and he ended up working for us for about 8 or 9 years.  He eventually did all the sandblasting. 

It was also during this time that we learned to cast glass.  We had been seeing pictures of Lalique’s cast architectural work and I was enamored of it, plus we were getting interested in doing carved glass art pieces and we thought a good shortcut would be to cast the base forms and then carve them.  To this end, Marc went to Lubbock for a casting workshop put on by Kent Ipsen.  They never cast a single piece of glass, in fact, spent the whole week building a kiln which didn’t even get finished, but Marc came back with enough knowledge to start us on our way.  He built a kiln out of an old refrigerator and I sold a job for Marathon Oil incorporating cast glass forms.

8. doing our homework

I have a busy week ahead of me this week.  My brain is focused on the art work and etching I need to do and the models I am constructing for the next set of cast pieces and I need to update my web site.  Now that fall is here and I am working again I ‘m looking back at the long slow summer and wondering how I could have let all that time slip by.  I know that I was resting, some much needed rest obviously, after the last several years of non-stop intensity.  I couldn’t have worked if I had wanted to.  I worried at first that I would be losing my forward momentum, all that I had achieved during the past 5 or 6 years towards getting noticed by the collectors but I’m thinking now that the crash in the economy coincided with my personal crash and perhaps that’s a good thing.  The world of glass art has not moved on without me.  It is resting too.  

Anyway, time to get to work this morning so here is another chapter in my ‘becoming’ story.  If you are new here and want to read from the beginning how I became a glass artist, go here and be sure and read from the bottom up.  All the entries except one are short.

continuing...

During these years (mid 70s to early 80s) we worked on our technique.  We scoured the libraries for books about glass engraving, etching or casting.  Our vision was to do Lalique and Stueben quality on an architectural scale.  They were our role models, what we looked to.   At that time there was no instruction in what we wanted to do.  We just stumbled our way along trying different things til we found something that worked well.  We started trying out stage blasting and eventually figured out carving techniques.  We glued lace to the glass and then blasted over it.  We learned how to glue chip, not an easy feat in this climate.

We did art shows.   We made contacts with the stained glass people.  We set about to put together a portfolio and started doing cold calls and presentations to interior designers and architects.  We tried to raise the visibility of glass art for your home and we started getting some really good commissions.

By the time we quit the Renaissance Festival, we were cultivating some very good relationships with some interior designers but mostly with architects or architectural firms with in house interior designers.  This worked well for us in one way but it also proved to be an error in judgment later.  We were getting a lot of corporate commissions but only the occasional residential commission and the residential work was what we had initially started out to do.

7. the Renaissance Festival

I notice it’s been months since I did an installment on becoming a glass artist.  Likely most my readers now haven’t read any of them so you can catch up here (but you’ll have to read from the bottom up).  The entries are all fairly short.  I’ve been looking for a photo that I know we have, have seen it floating around for years, to illustrate this next installment (originally divided into two), but what with the move and all, I can’t find it anywhere, so I give up.

 In 1976, we started doing the Renaissance Festival, six weekends in a row.  We did this Festival for seven years and it pulled our butts out of the fire more than once.  The way we got into the Renaissance Festival is that a friend of my parents had the drink concession there and he got us in, a really good spot too, number three on the right as you came in.  As a participant, you had to build your own little ‘store’ or booth.    

That first year (the second year for the Fair), it was crude.  We built a little corral out of reed fencing and had a table.  We strung wire across and hung small framed etched glass panels suitable for hanging in your window like a sun catcher.  We met the guy next to us, Wylie Ponder, a very talented fellow Texan who did watercolors and with whom we are still friends.  They had a glass blower there, blowing really crude stuff from cullet he got somewhere.  And they also had demonstrations from the Society for Creative Anachronism.  Let me tell you, those guys were serious about their game.  Didn’t take too well to jokes.  The whole fair itself, in the piney woods,  started out small and crude and it rains a lot in October and so by the end of the 6 weeks it was pretty much a mud hole.  We had to be in costume too.  I hadn’t given up sewing yet so I made ours.  (man, I wish I could find that picture)

It was fun the first few years.  The guy in charge, King George he called himself, strove to make it bigger, better and more authentic every year.  You had to improve your booth every year and people started building actual little houses and store fronts and if you wanted to keep your primo location and not get banished into the back half, it had to look really good, like the wealthy part of town.  We skated by our second year with a barely improved corral and our third year we got our friend Gene of the stained glass to do it with us and the real building started.  Over the years, Marc and Gene built a two story three sided building that we lived in during the weekends.  It had stained glass and etched glass windows.

Doing the Fair started to become a hardship during the last couple of years.  Our commission work was growing and it was taking us away from what we really needed to be doing and besides, it had quadrupled in size and King George was imposing more and more rules and restrictions.  That last year we did the Fair, 1982, he decreed that next year everyone had to talk in that stupid fake cockney olde english accent or suffer banishment.  That was it for us.  We sold our little structure for $6000 to the next sucker.

6. the Houston Glass Artists Association

In 1977, Gene Hester, a friend who does stained glass (and now fused glass) and Marc and I co-founded the Houston Glass Artists Association.  The way this came about was Gene was offered exhibition space at a bank downtown but he didn’t have enough work to fill the space.  So he came to us and another artist and we planned an exhibition.  We thought it would sound more professional and impressive if we had a fancy name so we called it the HGAA.  We did framed panels and somehow hung them in the space.  We did this another year and the third year we decided to open the exhibition to other glass artists in the area.  Thus began our co-presidency with Gene that lasted til around 1982 when the members had a revolt and wanted to elect their leaders.  The stained glass retailers took over and we left it to them.  It wasn’t that we weren’t interested if we couldn’t be in charge, it was that the focus of the group changed.  They sponsored several more exhibitions but I think the group finally petered out in 1985.

5. the joke's on me

(just a reminder that the numbered entries are chapters in how we got here)

Marc quit his job at the factory early in 1977 and by the time the year was over, we were both committed to our endeavor.  Somewhere in my head I have a memory swirling around of my talking him into it.  Come be an artist with me, I told him.  We can do it, I told him.  (Many years later it dawned on me that most all the working artists I knew had a working spouse that was not an artist to help with the cash flow.  Doh!)

It seemed like a good idea at the time and fun too, but there were many soul searching discussions in the next five years or so.  Our daughter was born in 1977, our son in 1979.  We struggled, counted our pennies, counted on our friends.  Marc would take part time jobs when necessary but we found that when he worked outside the studio, the studio didn’t make much progress when I was left with two preschoolers.  Each discussion ended up with deciding to hold on a little longer, hang in there, have faith that we were doing the right thing and always it seemed, just at the last moment, something would come in and buoy us up again and we were good for the next six months.

4. growing in more ways than one

I started this account of how I got to be a glass artist last month (February).  Then I went back and numbered them so as to set them out from their neighbors.  From now on, that is how I will denote another entry.  This account will try to follow a time line but you never know.  And it’s not just about being a glass artist.  It’s really about how we adopted this way of life.  

Mid 1975, I became inspired with the need to buy a house.  I wanted a place that was mine and a place where I could live and have my studio, sandblasting and all.  I had been using my parent’s backyard and then had tried to rent space in an edgy neighborhood but that didn’t work out.  I finally worked out a deal with a cabinet maker but he was getting tired of the arrangement.  So with the help of my parents, a family friend who had a realtor’s license and the advice of a friend of mine on areas of town, I bought a house in a marginal working class inner city neighborhood, mixed, by race and age, with more deteriorated areas around it.  In fact, it got worse before it got better, but that’s a different story.

Also mid 1975, I met Marc who worked third shift at Hughes Tool Co.  By early spring 1976 we had joined households and he basically helped support me while I did small art/craft shows and got the occasional commission.  We married in late summer of that year and a week later, I was pregnant.  By the time I was 6 months along, it became increasingly difficult for me to do all the work so Marc took over doing the sandblasting.  My little nascent studio had moved out of the house and into the two car garage. 

3. stepping out

I date my studio from 1974.  During that first year I acquired a business license and a DBA, a gravity feed sand pot and an air compressor.  It was my intention from the start to do architectural commission work.  Upon seeing that funky little rose on a piece of scrap glass, my mind had immediately leapt to the possibilities.  I had stood there seeing front door lites and windows in homes.

I started simply.  I explored different materials for stencils because masking tape is the absolute worst thing you can use.  I developed a few designs and made framed hanging panels and started doing art shows and fairs.  I was a little dismayed to find out that most people did not make the same leap from small etching to front door but it was at one of these shows in Galveston that I got my very first commission, a window with a victorian medallion design.

The following year, 1975, I met the man who would become my partner in life and before too long, my partner in the studio.

2. down the rabbit hole

The day I wandered into David’s studio I had no idea that my life was about to take on a direction, a direction that has lasted 34 years and counting.  I was recently divorced, no job and back living with my parents while searching for meaning in bars and beds.  

That particular day, I dropped in to visit and found David sandblasting a crudely stenciled rose masked off with masking tape onto a piece of glass.  I was instantly intrigued.  Show me how to do that, I told him.  And he did.  Thus began my life as a glass artist.  People often ask me how I chose glass as an artistic medium.  Having spent many years trying to paint, working with textiles, drawing, exploring ceramics and sculpture, that one instant in David’s studio sparked in me the way no other medium had.  Glass had chosen me.  

I remember thinking that day that I could make a living at this.  A true enough statement, however simplistic and naive it was.

1. the path

I am adding this little preface in readiness for tomorrow, for Steven’s transformative moment meme.  I didn’t write anything new because I had written this already.  This moment, in my young life, was the one that set me in my life’s direction.  I had others...meeting my husband/partner which settled me down, giving birth (Husband will tell you it completely changed me), even taking acid which changed the way I see the world...but the one that empowered me to take charge of my life, to MAKE my life, is here:

Being a self employed artist has its ups and downs.  The ups are being your own boss doing what you would do even if you didn’t get paid for it.  My vocation is my avocation.  Being self employed also means that when I want, I can take the day off, make time for my kids and now my grandkids, set my own schedule.  I can go sit in the sun for 15 or 20 minutes whenever I want or take a long lunch with a friend.  It also means working long hours to get a job out on time, trolling for work when nothing has come in, living hand to mouth, being totally responsible for having money at all.  These are trade-offs.  

When I first started at this adult life in my early 20s, it never occurred to me that I could make a living on my own without a ‘real’ job.  And then I met David, a self-employed artisan, who told me, when I expressed some bit of envy of his life, that ‘anyone can do it’.  It was a door opening and a light going off in my head, a sudden revelation.  I think back on that day now and I wonder, if my path had never crossed David’s, would I still be here?  Doubtful.  It was at his shop where I first saw someone sandblasting a design on glass, however crude the technique.  It was from his mouth that the magic words came.  He was a person in my life for a very short time, probably not even a year, and yet his effect on my life was profound.  With this crossing, a new path appeared before me and I chose it.