A very prominent glass sculptor once told me she's noticed that as she gets older her glass sculptures are getting smaller and smaller. "By the time I'm 65 I'll be down to making pendants," she snorted.
So Johnson & Johnson, a family company, is suing the American Red Cross for trademark infringement of its red cross. This oughta be fun. 112 years ago ARC founder Clara Barton (apparently unwisely) agreed that J&J had exclusive rights to use a red cross to sell bandaids and first aid kits and the like. Now the Red Cross has gotten [...]
If you read yesterday's post you probably got that I'm not exactly the world's biggest fan of sculpting wax. I am a huge fan, though, of sculpting in clay. That's why I've spent many hours figuring out how to cast my glass sculptures without a sticky, crud-colored drop of victory brown wax in the house. It worked. Mostly. Which is probably why I was visited by the wax missionaries.
So I have this thing about wax. Love it for candles and jam jars and letters. Hate it for sculpting. This is odd, since I sculpt. (And lately, I sculpt a lot.)
Art focuses on communications first, aesthetics second. Artisanry focuses on aesthetics first, communications second.
"Like the old art vs. craft thing," she shrugged, "I mean, who really cares? I don't care what you call me as long as I can do glass." I agreed. "As a matter of fact, I don't think a lot of what we call glass art is art. I think it's artisanry. To me, art is all about the content. If what you're showing off is the properties of the glass, it's artisanry, not art." Across the table I could see her tense, her eyes widened slightly and she got that "if I weren't being so polite I'd knock off your head and stuff it up your..." look. "And are you saying," she said carefully, "that what you call artisanry is not as good as art?"
So with a humungous glass sculpture inside, my little Skutt GM1414 decides to pull a fast one. Or rather a slow one...
Outside, been doing the BECon thing (and weathering jokes from bellboys about BECon, D-CON, etc...) down at the Hilton. Logistically, it's been a nightmare; Portland, "The City that Works," isn't working very well right now. About half of downtown Portland appears to be under construction, streets and all, which has made navigation and parking problematic. And the Hilton, like all commercial buildings, stays at a balmy 65 degrees inside and mostly serves iced drinks, which means I've been freezing the entire time.
Right after I posted about BECon and Dr. Linton's color theory class, Bullseye posts pictures of the class (and no, I'm not reading the New York Times...). Interesting look at BECon, though--if you ignore the mention of me in the photo it's worth reading....
Was honored by the presence of two really wonderful artists, Mel and Les "Twinvision" Rowe-Israelson, last week and this. They're in town to focus on building some reasonably massive glass sculptures, meeting up with the rest of the glass community and...BECon.
