My friend Becky's out for a few days, so I'm babysitting her gallery (do you call that gallerysitting?) and writing this between sales lulls. Becky and her husband Len are lovely folk; their gallery, Fireborne, is in downtown Portland near Pioneer Square.
"Naaah. I don't like that one. Let's try it again." He peered into the computer screen, hand poised over the trackball. "Ready...ready...ready....NOW!" He clicked firmly. "YES! That's the one I want," and began tapping at the keyboard. "You're going to a lot of trouble for my ID photo," I observed. A new client required that I have a corporate ID to move about their building, so I'd stopped in at the security desk to have the guard fix one up.
GLASSLAND, USA __ A new line of fusible glass promises to completely eradicate bad glass art within the next two years. Stumptown Glass Company's new Simpatico glass prevents artists from making poor artistic choices when developing kilnformed, cast or torchworked glass. The glass' built-in esthetic sense reviews the artist's composition, using criteria gathered from juries at leading art competitions around the world. If the composition exceeds those criteria, the glass removes itself from the work or breaks.
It's official: I've had my first "me" show in an art gallery, where I was one of the attractions instead of one of the crowd. And boy did I learn a lot, mostly about what NOT to do. (For the record, the show is at Guardino Gallery on Alberta Street in Portland--if you missed the reception you missed a really nice party and a really beautifully laid-out show, including Leah Wilson's wonderful paintings. It'll be up until April 27.) Biggest lesson: It's one thing to send a couple of pieces to somebody else's show. It's QUITE another to be the show.
She was almost exactly as wide as she was tall, and (apparently) humiliated by it. The first words out of her mouth were "I used to be really thin." She whipped out a picture of herself as a teenager to prove it. Mind you, she was 45, happily married, the mother of a little girl and a college freshman. What [...]
Wow. That was fun. Just got back from the reception for my first advertised art show, and I had a ball. The work got a pretty positive reception, I loved the way it fit with my gallery partner Leah Wilson's paintings (so did she) and people couldn't have been nicer. The folks at Guardino Gallery made it a wonderful experience.
What's worse than Castuary?* Castuary squared. What's worse than Castuary squared? Obviously: Castuary cubed. I am in Castuary for three simultaneous firings, and it's driving me nuts. I've stuffed my own kiln to the gills, along with Hugh's kiln and Kat's kiln, as if I'm in some goofy and rather spendy race to see which spits out sculpture the fastest. And it's teaching me a great lesson in the whole artist/show/gallery thing: Procrastination costs bigtime money and biggertime anxiety.
"I'm really not a cab driver," he confessed, as he negotiated a sharp left on what felt like two of the cab's four wheels. "You can't imagine how surprised I am to hear that," I said drily, clutching the armrest for dear life. "So what is it you really do?"
If you added up all my blogposts since 2003, you'd have something like 7,200 separate articles. Only about 650 are actually searchable on morganica.com right now. Tried to import the rest, but so far can't figure out a way to do that without spamming the heck out of the 1,500 or so subscribers who asked to be notified when I [...]
Hey--just a fast note for Ernie lovers: Ernie's mom is in the news. Brenda Griffith, the powerhouse GlassValkyrie wonderwoman of Atlanta, is doing her best to convert the South to kilnforming (and beadmaking and glassblowing and, apparently, nude dates at the gloryhole, but that's another story).
