Reflecting on Work

Last year I applied for and got a job I had wanted for a long time , as manager of the group that I worked in. We had a lot of changes that year. One colleague died, another left, and then the two of us who were left, stepped up a rung. The hiring was competitive, not a given. My role changed significantly, and it was a new role I had been itching to try on for a while. I was pretty sure, that as good as I am at designing and implementing evaluation, I would be tons better at managing and coaching evaluators. I was right. I am a very intuitive person. Most of my decisions are almost instinctual. I can read a resume, walk into my director's office and say "this is the woman you want to hire for that job." Three months later after interviewing many people, she hires the woman I picked. I had to hire two new staff almost immediately after my promotion and I found two amazing bright creative women to work on our team. No regrets.

I have had two big challenges, to step up and change my focus from "research research research always first and foremost" to "how can our unit support everyone else". It was tough, because frankly I am always right and I don't get how most people don't see that. And research should come first. (Tongue by the way - firmly planted in my cheek)

Today, two big things happened. I finished off a report from hades - an evaluation of a project I didn't do, a project that was less than well implemented. Our VP told me that I made a silk purse from a Sow's ears. He was pleased with the product. Always nice when a VP takes note. And then late in the day I learn that I am receiving an award from the organization for excellence. I told my director that I didn't think last year was even my best year. She said I was only focussing on what I had struggled with. To be honest, I can't think of one damned thing I accomplished last year. No products anyway. It was all about process and grieving and healing and rebuilding. So maybe I did something good.

It's a good thing I am doing well at the office because I got another rejection from a jury notice on Friday. I think I'll paper the walls of the studio with those letters. It didn't hurt, there are too many other things that are more important. A sister whose heart is breaking, a mother-in-law back in the hospital, getting my own back back in shape.

And I need to channel all that energy back into the studio. Maybe I'll get to it this weekend.... I 've missed it. That report consumed all my free time the last few weeks. I am so happy to be where I can finally refocus and start work on some of the wafers I need to make.

Okay, one last thought. Bruce and I have started watching Big Love. Oh my god. It has everything. I didn't think I could like it but I am totally sucked in. They didn't ignore the dark side of polygamy, but they sure found the light and the humor in it as well. With my luck it will get cut in a season....

The injustice of it all....

Some days I want to walk up to every childless woman I know and ask her how she manages. Most days it's fine, but some days.... I always wanted to have children, always imagined my life with children, the things I would do that my parents didn't do the things they did, that I wouldn't do, the things I would share with them that my parents shared with me.

It was already pretty late in my life when I found someone to settle in with. I'm glad I waited because he is the perfect man for me. I was eager to start trying to have a family with him, but babies were not in the cards. For a lot of reasons we stopped trying at a certain point because we didn't want to take the paths that were our options. I couldn't do in vitro, I just couldn't. And adopting wasn't something that he was comfortable with.

So I let go of that vision for my life. It still makes me sad some days, hence the wanting to be nosy and ask a woman outright, does it hurt you too? Was this a free choice for you, or a forced choice? How do you fill that empty space? I can't help getting mad at the universe. My sister who never really imagined herself with children has three, all loved and cared for. All she has to do (literally) is go without protection once and she is pregnant. Where is the justice in that? Is it some kind of cosmic joke?

So I throw all of the energy I would have thrown at a child at my kiln. Some days this consumes me and it is the only way I can manage the sadness. Most days I forget the pain, forget the empty spot. My friends have stopped having babies for the most part. Approaching 50, we are less likely to be starting families. But every once in a while I catch a glimpse of an acquaintance or a friend with a small child, every once in a while I am bowled over by the child who is my goddaughter, and my heart breaks all over again.

Time to hit the studio...

Surprise Update...

Brought the whole lot of color study trays to the gallery this morning. Manager wasn't in this weekend, but she had seen the images and said bring them in. We didn't get to talk price, I imagine she will get sticker shock at the price I gave the work. If I price them any lower, then I don't make enough money on them to make the work worth my while. If they want more of the older work, I will make some for them, albeit reluctantly.

It was nice to get gallery staff feedback on the trays as they unwrapped the package; they loved the depth of color and the silken feel of the coldworked glass.

I went to see the owner of the gallery in their second location and chatted him up a bit. He showed me the press release for the juried show of the National Capitol Art Glass Guild that they will be hosting in May. (I was juried in with the Out of Asia piece.) Aside from the work I have donated to the Pilchuck Auctions, this is the first piece juried into a show in two years. I have crappy photos to blame for that. One day maybe I will find a photographer who works well for me. Either that or I will have to set up a studio of my own....

I cleared the use of french cleats for hanging the piece in the show. It's always a worry of mine, that the gallery will refuse to screw holes into walls.

I was amazed to see the new line of Peggy Kar work, the fuzion line. I actually like these. The bright colors, the retro/mod designs. The design is a world apart from her other work and truly sabroso. I don't think I ever imagined that she could do abstract or pop.

My brain is tired, my back is tired, and I can't really think. This stream of unconsciousness has to stop... now.

The blog is dark

I always love the expression about the theatre being dark on the day the actors get a day off. I feel like I have been in the dark, able to post to but not able to view this blog for four days now, and counting..... It isn't just the act of writing my thoughts and experiences that satisfies, it is also the interchange a blog can afford me, when I read other's comments on the blog posts, that makes this worthwhile. So for four days now the blog has been dark and I feel like I am in withdrawl. The other blog is up, but I have no new art to post to it. So, I'll stay in the dark for now curled up in an imaginary blanket, waiting for when they unshutter my window to the world....

Surprise!

Today I get an email from the gallery that still has a few of my pieces. The Washington Post food editor picked up a couple of trays and small plates of mine to be featured in the food section on April 5. Can you spell SHOCKED???

Of course it's always the work I don't care for that others like. These were silly trays, two layers of transparent glass with one piece of zigzag dichro running in a line the short way on the piece. Fast, easy to make, and I hate them! She wants more of my work so that she can take advantage of the press. I haven't done anymore of those trays, but I'd guess that that's what she wants, and by the fifth!

I sent her images of the color study trays, don't know if she will like them. I guess I need to haul out the transparent colors and start cutting big old rectangles. ugh. I don't even have any pictures of this glass. At least I still have the zigzags I bought when I was thinking about making these.

On being an artist -- content/intent

What does content or intent mean, and do we have to have it before we start a piece?

Uh, no.

I think it's perfectly valid to work in the dark, just laying things down and attributing a meaning to it later on. I often work from my unconscious mind. Like a dream, the finished piece reveals itself to me, reveals me to myself.

It took me a while to figure out that Beneath the Blanket Fort was about safety and security, that it was about trying to find a small safe space in my universe over which I could have complete control. Its genesis was simple. One evening I decided I wanted to let go and try something new, something that did not use human figures in the imagery and was limited in palette. For a long time I had wanted to compose a piece using the whites of my glass palette. So I set up the dimensions of the piece on my kiln shelf and began composing. I was still finding my way through grief at the time and my need for a quiet place made itself known during the composition. Before calling it Beneath the Blanket Fort, the piece went through quite a few names, mainly based on what others told me it spoke to them. When I finally recognized that my abstracted works were not about actual places, but rather about how those places made me feel, things fell into place and I saw what this piece was about.

At other times it is very clear to me what experiences and feelings are driving the work I am doing. The work is more conscious and planned out. Numerous sketches precede the composition of the piece. The three series I am working on right now, about prayer, sadness and heartbreak are planned. I have something I want to say about those feelings and experiences. I am careful and deliberate in the composition of these works.

I started this thread because a friend posted on her blog a journal entry from a year, responding to a thread on the Warmglass site :

I read it and realized that I don’t have a spiritual history or a motivation for my work. It is beautiful, therefore it is. Does that mean it is not Art because there is no meaning behind it? Should I start trying to make art based on things I feel and care about? If so, I will become an environmental artist, and most of that work I find schlock. It also doesn’t lend itself to what I like to do. Many of the artists on the list don’t like production work—they just want to do inspired art pieces. I like production. Does that mean I’m not an artist?

I don't really think that it's production versus one offs that determines whether someone is or is not an artist. In fact I think there are people who call themselves artists, do one-offs only and proudly refuse to do production work -- probably because they are incapable of repeating themselves again and again because their technical skills are not sufficiently good for repeating a design. There, I said it. Duck and Run for cover, the mudslingfest is on my heels.

On the other hand there are people working in production who are artists. Just because you made that plate before, does not mean that it has no content or meaning. And often we make things with content without recognizing or without naming the content in the work. My first teacher in clay, Estefania Moraos, is credited by the foremost clay artists in Venezuela for having been their teacher. Fanny runs a small production studio surrounded by banana trees, coffee bushes and Mango trees. Her ceramics are what enables her to survive economically. Her work is sublime, I am proud to own some of her pieces. I would never say that she is not an artist because she runs a production studio.

Ultimately, what's art is what the user, the viewer, the buyer thinks is art. They may have been told it's art by a gallery, a museum or their heart. And if you think of yourself as an artist, then you are, at the very least in your heart. I guess I would just be happy to sell my work.

Catching up on life

I took some time off from work today to have lunch with my oldest friend. Have known her for more than half my life, almost two thirds (next year) , since we were in college. It was an almost-a-month-late birthday lunch (mine). We picked the same thing off the Sweetwater Taven menu, a divine salad, grilled sushi grade tuna (mine was rare) with lettuce, dates, dried cranberries, pine nuts, pickled ginger, goat cheese, some of those crunchy asian noodles you get with take out wonton soup, and a champagne citrus dressing. Sublime. Talked for 2 hours, catching up on this and that, all the drama in our lives. Plotted a rite of passage this summer for my goddaughter who will be starting middle school. What a wonderful mom Deb is! And why didn't my mom understand that things like contact lenses and plucked eyebrows, mascara and lip gloss would have changed my life? Somehow I think it would have made a difference in a world where standing out is so not cool.

Ended the afternoon in a visit to my physiatrist, the MD on my solve-the-back-pain team. I am working hard with two PT sessions weekly, usually two hours each, and a torturous deep tissue massage once a week that usually reduces me to tears at least once. My miracle workers have me so flexible that for the first time in my life, ever, I can bend down with straight knees and touch the floor. And it's more than fingertips grazing the floor. But I still hurt most of the time and the pain exhausts me. It doesn't help my depression (that I can't always shake off even with the drugs). A few nights ago I went to bed in tears, inconsolable I was hurting so much. Today is a little better, not much. So what did the good doctor do when she saw me today? We tried a trigger point injection last month, it was supposed to help my muscles in the thoracic spine area relax. This month she decided we would try for a more agressive solution. So she will do a stereotaxic (to help her locate the exact spot) injection of BOTOX! Who knew that slightly paralyzing the muscle would help it to relax and learn how to behave? Oh I hope this works.... More on this after we do it.

Chronic illness is a bitch. When I was struggling with adult onset asthma years ago (from the "sick building" I worked in) I began to see how difficult it is to negotiate the medical system without an advoacte, how depressing it can be to not get solutions that work, to be treated like a moron by physicians who think I can't understand the statistics reported in the PDR because I don't have the allmighty MD after my name. I learned a lot about the importance of working with physicians who are good communicators and the perils of dealing with HMO physicians. (I was once diagnosed with a brain tumor over the phone by a doctor I had never met because he refused to believe that the dizziness I was experiencing could be caused by the drug his colleague had prescribed. And didn't suggest I come in to get it checked out!)

Now I deal with something different. The demon my friend with RA has been battling for fifteen years has come to stay in my house - chronic pain. I now understand why she has days when she has no energy for getting out of bed. I am going to continue to work on this -- my goal is to boot that stinker out of my house and return to being the cheerful playful woman poor Bruce married nearly eight years ago.

Early Morning Panic Fest

Today is not getting off to an auspicious beginning. Or perhaps I have tried to do too many things all at once?Last week I paid a deposit on the group French Cleat order, nearly $3000. I also bought two airline tickets for our trip to France this summer. I also paid a deposit on an apartment for the time in Paris. What happens this morning? I check my bank account and discover that not only have I paid the $2500 for the airline tickets, but because the charge went through separately, the first authorization, placing $2500 on hold is also in effect and should be until at least Thursday.

Uh, I don't have an extra $2400 to spare today. We just paid a bunch of bills, and the last checks from the French cleat advances haven't been deposited yet. Full scale early morning panic attack. I call the bank, they are no help. I call Air France, they are no help. I panic some more. I can make a trip to one bank and withdraw some money to deposit to this account but it will take me time I can't afford today -- busy busy day in the office!

I enlist Bruce's help. Some calls I don't want to make from cubicle land. Bruce calls Tony who says he hasn't deposited the french cleat deposit check and will wait a day. Pfewsh! I really hate panic days, and the thought of bouncing the cleat check was making me beyond ill....

Influences

I was going through images of some of my works in progress this evening and was struck by the influence of my visit to the Sean Scully show at the Phillips in January. Several things about that show had a huge impact on me. The first was the smell of the paintings. I have been to many galleries and seen many shows, but never have I been almost assaulted by the smell of fresh paintings. There were some paintings in this show from the 90s, but the largest part of the show was work from this century. Stepping off the elevator into the first room of the show I was blown away by the size of the first work I saw. I knew they were big, but knowing and experiencing is different. Then after some time wandering from piece to piece the shock of the size and the luminous beauty of the work gave way to inspection of the details. It's what I live for, delving beneath the surface. Scully's paintings are a feast for my soul. The layers of color beneath the surface peek through, hinting at what lies beneath, tantalizing the imagination. Imagine a victorian woman dressed all in black but at the hem of her dress a hint of red lace peeks out. What things you could imagine about the woman who wears such vivid color beneath her somber attire!

While I have been layering color a lot in my recent works, I don't hide much. You see all of the layers and there is something satisfying to me about revealing what lies beneath. However, when I was working on Despecho, I ended up mostly obscuring what lay beneath. There was something intensely satisfying about showing some of the inner pain and things outside the person that affects his or her world while keeping the deepest things hidden, as we often do.

Despecho is definitely not about a person wearing their heart on their sleeve.

Fine craft market? Fine art market? No market?

Sometimes I can be so rash in my proclamations. Like saying I don’t see myself producing for a fine crafts market. It isn’t that I think I am “above it”. (Some folks seem to think that if you are aiming for the art market you are snooty and think you and your work are better than those producing for the craft market. But then there are also those who think they are better than those producing for the art market because we don’t do multiples or whatever.) That’s not me. If I decide I am not going to aim for a certain market it is because I know my limitations. First and foremost my limitation is time. If I worked full time at this then maybe I would be focusing more on producing for the wholesale market at least part of the time. But I don’t and won’t anytime soon, so I can’t.

Last month I stated emphatically, no fine craft market for me. Last night as I pulled another color study out of the kiln, I wondered if I could make these in such a way that I could profit from them. And that means hitting the fine craft market. Will I do it? I’m not sure. It’s a big undertaking and I haven’t got the free time to do it. I will have to stop making these addictive trays if I am not going to sell them. I really need to hold fast to my commitment to show my work in juried shows, or at least submit to them, this year. I have work in one juried show already.

I found it difficult working for one of the local glass galleries. First of all, what they wanted me to make wasn’t what I liked to do but I kept trying to make what they were looking for. And hated it. They weren’t too interested in the work I wanted to make. So at some point I decided that it wasn’t worth the meager amount of free time that I had to work in the studio on work that I didn’t enjoy making. And when I let go of the need to produce for the gallery my work began to take off. I started thinking about it differently, approaching it differently, spending more time on the planning and execution of the work, and seeing the results of that shift. Plus, somehow, letting go of what I had been doing enabled me to be so much more creative than I had been in the past.

I could not have let go of that need to produce work that was selling without the support of my husband.

Now I have to figure out where to take my work next. Because I need to be in a gallery somewhere.