Got the sweetest email the other day, right on the heels of my, er, terms & conditions for the use of this blog. Don't know if one had anything to do with the other, but it sure tickled me to read this: Hi Cynthia I just wanted to send you a quick thanks for imparting your wonderful knowledge on the use of super glue with fusing.
We pulled into the parking lot of a little Mexican restaurant just outside Olympia and I shut off the engine. Fifteen minutes later a woman slipped out of a blue pickup and handed Becky a boxfull of owl. Barred owl, to be precise, now sitting in CherryBaby's back seat. I hit the gas and we headed for home. One little shopping trip and the god of adventure turns my shopping trip into Wild Kingdom.
Woke in the wee hours Monday night to thunder rumbles and flashes of day-bright light. PDX weathermen had predicted fair weather, so naturally glassland was having one of its rare thunderstorms. I snuggled down into the covers and purred, listening to rain drumming on the skylight. No way was I sleeping through this, so I after awhile I pulled out Izzy the 'Pad and started figuring out how to respond to some rather odd emails. Finally decided the best way was to simply put them in a post. The first three are pretty direct (I'm paraphrasing only slightly, mostly to avoid embarrassing anyone):
Lemme borrow a writer’s proverb for a sec: I hate coldworking. I love having coldworked. More particularly, I love having coldworked by hand.* I’ve so far found nothing to match the incredible, silky finish you get with hand-coldworking a piece of glass, so I was really interested in Paul Tarlow’s new book, Coldworking Glass without Machines: A complete guide to [...]
Strange days indeed. I'm driving home on a warmish 4th of July night, heading down the hill on I5 from Vancouver. The highway's like rush hour with everyone going home from celebrations, and headlights and taillights fight it out with hundreds of rocketbursts in every direction. And through it all a slivermoon* rises like scorched gold, far too big to be true.
I never asked her name, and after I'd talked with her awhile I didn't really want to know it. In my mind she'd become Mary, and finding out that her name was really Beth or Linda or Agatha would have just screwed things up. "That's a lovely coat," I'd said admiringly, as we both waited for coffee, "Do you mind if I take your picture?" The farmers marketfolk swirled around us, doing their best to look glassland-wierd. A half-shaved girl in a clown costume gallumped past, and three girls in crayon-colored Hello Kitty! slickers danced around us in the rain, singing about bicycles.
BeCON's over and done, my creativity is stirred, my glassjones are bubbling, and I'm bubbling over with new glassist friends. Here's a wrap-up of my 2011 BeCON reports--but if you don't want to read that, how about the best (and not so best) of BeCON 2011?
The presence of Portland Farmers Market a few yards away might be reason enough to attend BeCon, Bullseye's biannual glass conference, but there are others. I usually gain fresh insights, and the one I picked up this year was a doozy, quite possibly not one intended by our hosts: Glass isn't a medium, it's a crutch. We don't need to cross over as much as we need to throw away the crutch. (Honk if you think that's scary)
If yesterday's BeCON was about art vs. craft, today's was about superstars, the rovers who successfully made the trip from glass artist to artist, or who retained an open enough mind to cross into kiln forming for awhile. Or at least it started out that way, since the opening presentation was Lino Tagliapietra, Dante Marioni and Marc Petrovic talking about the intersection of glassblowing and kilnforming with BE research dude Ted Sawyer.
You can generally say three things about the first half-day of Bullseye's BeCON glass conference; It's the world's longest half-day (about 16 hours this time), it involves a lot of hugging, and the best part happens after 7pm. Thank heavens they didn't decide to make this a FULL day.
