It was a cool enough day yesterday to do a little torchwork at my jewelry bench. I don't get a chance very often, because it takes a good number of hours that have to be completely uninterrupted once I light that torch. It also has to be cool and breezy so that I don't burst into flames or fill the place up with propane fumes. As it is, my partner sometimes gets a headache from the fumes. I keep trying to open enough windows and turn on enough fans, but his desk is directly downstream from my workbench, so... sigh...
While dealing with server slowdowns, I'm getting into a relatively little known function in WordPress: wp-cron and what it is doing behind the scenes. A cron is a subroutine that performs future tasks according to a schedule, so it's necessary to make sure it is running and running well. It's also good to lighten the load on your server to ensure the best experience for your visitors. There are reports of wp-cron sometimes using a lot of CPU; which happened to us a couple of days back and brought the server to it knees. Everything was going along as normal then BOOM! the server load spiked through the roof: Apache had 500+ connections open, CPU at 100%, physical RAM exhausted, swap space nearly full before it finally died down. During that time, the blogs exhibited Error Connecting To Database in the browser. All blogs were off line. Not good.
New ways to enjoy my artwork, and they're fun for me to make too. When I started getting my art pieces listed on Etsy and ArtFire, of course I drove around to see what else was selling and at what prices. I found these Scrabble tiles with various images plastered on the front. And immediately I thought "I can do better than that!!!"
Pelagia, by BJ Johnson
It had to happen sooner or later and I'm now surprised that it hadn't already happened. In an effort to make our imagery and our glass work as accessible to as many fans as we can, Joy has developed a new glass jewelry line called ImaGems; the combining of Image and Gems. They are miniature images of ours viewed through a fused crystal lens that hangs on a silver chain and bail as a pendant necklace. They're sure to catch attention.
An order came in this morning. Yay! It was for an art glass marble, and those have a numbering system dependent on which date they were blown, what piece number that day and what recipe was used. A little complicated, but necessary. So I immediately went to my files to find out which marble it was so that I could go find it in the display rack.
The website page showed that the piece was the second on this page:
http://glasssculpture.org/artglass/paperweights/marbles.html
Captured Worlds Marble
I've had a fascination with glass artwork from the time I was 15 and saw some amazing reverse painted glass. At that time, I just knew that I liked it, but never considered going into any sort of art career. When I was 19, I went to a library I'd never been in before and one entire wall was formed into a stained and molded glass window, with a huge tree as the focal point. Much of the piece was stained glass, flat, but what I remember most is that some of the leaves were done in blown or cast glass and sculpted to come out of the window into the library space. The sculptural look of it was incredible. I sat staring for hours at the form that went from flat and then out into space and then back into flat. Again, I just knew I liked it.
It's the singular quote we hear more often from people who see our larger pieces of artwork. "Wow, it's just like Chihuly!" I used to get a little miffed at that comment, because our works are NOT just like Chihuly. Our works are our own and usually meant to depict something in particular, like the Solar System. From the many pieces I've seen of his works, they're a conglomeration of lots of littler pieces into a giant swirly piece. It's the sheer magnitude of all the pieces put together that makes it so dramatic. And *he* doesn't even do all the work himself. We do all our own work!
I got to thinking that for the past several months, I've been discussing the failures with that sink job, both on here and on my Facebook/Twitter accounts. I've gotten comments that maybe I shouldn't spend my time making sinks. Well, it isn't that I *can't* make sinks, it's that I couldn't make *those* sinks as they had to fit a very precise position in the client's countertop.
I don't know if most creative types are this way, but I find that I have waaaay too many ideas for the amount of hours in a day. And they all seem cool, and I want to do them all. It's a challenge not to try them all. But what I really find is that I want to try so much stuff, I end up not knowing where to begin and 8 million projects get started, but nothing ever gets finished.
After six months of getting pummeled by failures in trying to cast glass sinks to fit an existing counter top that was forbidden by the client to be modified—even by a little, my partner in art got a nice reward. Along the path of these varied projects that we do, comes knowledge that you don't know how it will be used. One day, though, it all comes together in glorious fashion.
A couple of years ago, I suggested that she try sand painting techniques that the Native Americans use in order to put designs in glass colors onto various items that she was creating; either with powders or small frit. Over the months, her technique has developed to a point where the results are stunning. Check it out!
