Cinderella finally makes it to the ball

I wrote awhile back about the trials and tribulations of making glass feet. I do want to report that Maria showed Cinderella Story, (above) at Art in the Pearl a couple of weeks ago, complete with the temporary “lemonade” foot. She says it generated a lot of excitement, so we know that at least it’s on the right track.

Now to focus on getting the bloody kiln finished so we can make the RIGHT color foot.

Playing footsie

Why is it that the simplest projects have the biggest potential to drive you up a tree?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you might recall me mentioning talented sculptor Maria Wickwire Palensky. She approached me last spring about casting a transparent foot and ankle for one of her sculptures.

Among other things, Maria interprets ancient mythologies surrounding women. Her work is stunningly beautiful. My friend Les and I headed up to her house in the mountains (where I especially fell in love with Persephone, below).

Maria had a problem: She’d engaged a glassist to cast part of a sculpture in transparent glass, but after several months’ work the project had failed. Could I take it on?

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Creative bravery

Art takes courage. I find that fascinating (also scary).

I’m not talking about the courage it takes to put your work out there, live through rejection and put it out again, although that takes plenty of guts. But rejection’s a given in my dayjob, and like most writers I’ve built up armor against it: You don’t fall in love with your own words in the first place, so you can stay objective when an editor carves them up. (Note to Susan who patiently listened to my screeching as she edited my humor columns: Yeah, yeah…but that was different, a matter of flow and timing, not love! )

I gotta admit that it cuts closer to the bone when my art is rejected so maybe I’m not all THAT objective. But what I’m really talking about here is the courage to create art in the first place, which for some reason I’m finding particularly terrifying right now.

It takes guts to get the first mark on the paper (or the first blob of clay in a freshly planed surface). Guts to leave the model you’re slavishly copying and work instead from your head (or maybe your heart). You need courage to tear out what’s almost right and start over even though there’s no guarantee the next version will be better. To know when to keep going and (more important) when to stop. To take a now-perfect clay model and destroy it with plaster or silicon.

It’s hard to trust yourself, to trust instinct. To get past the idea that there oughta be an Undo button for clay and frit and instead work without a safety net. (In this respect, computers have a LOT to answer for; I’ll bet Rodin never worried about an Undo button.)

Boiled down, it means to finally understand in my bones that I can control this, and that the best stuff happens when I’m having fun.

But it’s weeks like this that I really wonder if I’m brave enough, which is why the guy in my current project (above) is no longer zennishly calm but looks instead as if he’s had the beejaysus scared out of him. Dammit. I’m not channeling my art, my art is channeling me, and I need to smack it upside the head and finish this thing so I can invest it, get it into the kiln and move on.

In other words, Cynthia, geeeeeeez. Lighten up.

Intelligent Kiln Project: Genesis

So what if your kiln was smart? (Gosh, this sounds like a GE commercial)

But… what if your kiln really was smart? What if it sensed things happening during a firing, analyzed and decided on a course of action, then responded appropriately? 

Would that make a difference in the way you fire glass? The time it takes? The way you construct molds or assemble the glass? In your firing success rates? The amount of glass you could fire at one time? Would it allow you to discover (and potentially auto-correct) a problem that occurs during firing? Most important, would it make a difference in what you can fire? 

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Selling babies

First of all, I’ve never really thought of myself as sentimentalist. Sure, I sometimes sob at tearjerker chickflicks. And a cracking good animation or a sublimely elegant algorithm or hardware that really IS “plug and play” or somebody just being nice for no good reason or truly amazing or content-rich art invariably results in leaky optics. And maybe I get a little misty eyed at certain scents or songs or…

OK, I’m as sentimental as all get-out. My creative side, however, is about as sentimental as a rock. A cold, hard, cash-on-the-barrelhead, businesslike rock.

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