I could be doing something useful, like catching up on the backlog of beads that piled up while I was away watching other people play with glass, or even be inputting financial records. For those of you who think making little glass objects perforated with holes the height of amusement, reading about the ISGB’s annual conference will surely be more interesting.
For my money, the ISGB provides two useful services, both of them educational in value: the Forum, and the Gathering. In my view, (and that of perhaps a third of other participants, who switched to wetcanvas as a result) the board really mishandled the logon requirement for the “new” forum, but that's a rant polemic, boring, and overlong. They haven't managed to annoy me out of going to Gathering, though I try not to push my luck (by attending the general meeting, for example.)
I really enjoyed this year's gathering.
Attended a good and very helpful (if not technical enough for my taste) lecture on glass color chemistry by Henry Grimmett of Glass Alchemy; toured the Bullseye Glass Factory ; saw lots of great lectures. Lots on precision dot techniques this year—Warring States by Larry Brickman and Dustin Tabor, and, what I found to be a particularly nice pairing, Lani Ching's new basketweave approach, followed by Terri Caspari-Schmidt’s presentation, in which she explained how she developed her own style after “making 500 blue ‘Lani Ching-style’ beads” —utterly fascinating. Interesting to note which people flatten their large dots (Brickman doesn't like to; Tabor uses the marver to reposition [slightly] off dots; Caspari-Schmidt depends on marvering to get her signature elongated oval dots and hair-thin lines between).
Since there are two (color) borosilicate manufacturers in Portland, the theme this year was boro. To that end, Lewis Wilson, Kevin O'Grady, Tom Boylan and Gail Crosman Moore demoed. I consider myself production oriented and woefully sloppy when it comes to standards, but when Mr. Wilson said something along the lines of “you don't have to worry about trapping bubbles in borosilicate beads because the glass is too stiff for them to float to the surface” I walked out. Why do things ‘fast'n’easy’ when one can do them slowly and painfully? I was mildly amused by his title, though. Kevin O'Grady was going to demo a bracelet, but did something else, with stripes as I recall, instead. Crosman Moore's subtly colored beads didn't get the attention they deserved, either at her lecture or at the bazaar, which I thought was a shame. Of course, I'm a textile person, so perhaps I was more inclined to appreciate her felted flowers with boro centers and seed bead embroidery. Very understated, very nice.
Part of Crosman Moore's problem was the video. In order for several hundred people to watch a demo, the flameworker is shot with a video camera, which is projected onto 2 large screens, real time. The same crew has done the Gathering for the last three years, and these guys are good; but unfortunately, their new (90k?) camera had a curved lens. Well, the filter (to remove the orange sodium flare) is flat, and the result was the focus was terrible and the colors washed out. I had no idea of the richness of her color until after her demo was over and I happened to walk up to the stage to see the beads ‘in the glass’.
Moreover, the stage was awkward, so they couldn't really position the camera over the beadmaker's shoulder, from behind, having instead to shoot from the side, which meant the beadmaker's hands were in the way a lot of the time. Subtle, smaller stuff was particularly hard to track. Lani Ching's demo was almost impossible to follow; I happen to do that technique, so I knew what she was doing, but I couldn't see it. Crosman Moore also suffered from this problem. However, the video guys intend to have their problems straightened out in the future, even to running practice sessions with the demonstrators before Gathering next year. I have high hopes.
How the co-ordinators managed to lure Tom Boylan onto stage is not something I could tell you, but I —and many other fans—were delighted to see this guy work and talk about his beadmaking philosophy. And wonder of wonders, he actually had more than 5 beads to sell this time:) Patricia Frantz, another whose history goes back to the beginning of the current American art-glass beadmaking movement, showed her approach for working dichro (mash it down between the jaws of big tweezers, rather than a marver for more pressure with less torque on the bead release). Caspari-Schmidt's presentation, like that of Boylan's, also included some of her working philosophy, as well as a wonderfully developed history of her aesthetic development illustrated with great slides. I was extremely impressed with this beadmaker who, when asked last year to demo said she “physically backed away”; I'm so glad they persisted! —Of course, I love the precision dot work and have ever since being initially entranced by Kristina Logan's twisted dot flowers, but it's not something I do at all well, so all the dot people really impressed me. (This is not to say I haven't tried sculptural stuff, and that I'm not equally bad at it, but somehow it just doesn't seem as difficult, even though it is.)
In the sculptural camp, Kathy Johnson demonstrated an eye cane and horse-head bead (very nice, but shouldn't they have saved her for next year, when this is in Kentucky?), and two folks I consider to be the Queen & King of comedy in the beadmaking world, Sharon Peters and Loren Stump demoed gargoyle faces and the stump sucker, respectively. Both of these teachers will be happy to show you absolutely anything they know—it was from Sharon I learned to raise my tables with pvc extenders, and I can remember goggling when she collared me to explain this really cool technique she'd just figured out last week—that's generosity for you—and of course Loren Stump is famous for going and going and going during his classes, till his exhausted students beg for mercy. A note about Stump's website—the page linked to the domain name, http://www.stumpchuck.com is one of those stupid, stupid flash things, with no links to normal pages for those of us not into macromedia, java, or whathaveyou. I tried adding an /index.html to the url, and it worked, but not to have this linked to the front page is inexcusably bad web design. Shame on the designer!
It's been a pleasure to watch the increasing sophistication of Sharon's work. I've seen the stump sucker demonstrated before (yes, I am a survivor of Loren's weeklong seminar on murrini, figures and paperweights) but he's added a few new twists. Though perhaps not as screamingly funny as the presentation last time, in which he took a set amount of glass and reworked it to various suggestions from the audience with only the aid of eating utinsels, not to mention the fact that he was grilling his sandwich with his torch, this presentation was a nice little demo for (partial?)vacuum casting, such as paperweight makers do, using an inexpensive pump developed by Craig Milliron of Arrow Springs.
Craig, by the way, got the bead hall of fame plaque this year, and it couldn't’ve happened to a nicer guy. Many people have stories of his patient handholding during various technical crises—in my case, he effectively doubled the life of my thermocouple by shepherding me through some arcane process by which the other half of some circuit or other was put into play after the first one wore out (they do that, after switching on and off 400,000 or so times.)
The most expensive bead I own is a Leah Fairbanks floral, so it should come as no surprise that I enjoyed her flat urn presentation. And what about my specialty, hollow beads? Pam Dugger did a presentation on that, and I skipped part of it, on the theory that I have this down, sort of. That was almost certainly a mistake. Oh well. Well, I did at least learn some cute tricks for rescuing beads that have broken from their release—I've puntyed them up (Loren Stump's approach). Dugger paints more release on, or makes a spacer bead, and runs a bridge between the two. I've done this, but I've always been careful to make the bridge free-floating. She runs hers right along the mandrel, on the release, giving it more holding power. She burns it off just before putting the bead in the kiln.
I missed the parts where she explains how to deal with blowouts, so the best I can do is supply my tricks, for what they're worth, instead.
Lani Ching and her husband did a ‘yoga for beadmakers’ —I'd never encountered ‘chair yoga’ before (not a huge surprise—I've taken all of 8 sessions—one little class) and was intrigued. My abs ached for 2 days. While they didn't do anything drastic like inversions, they did give us all a very nice workout, which I certainly appreciated. This was great, and I wished we'd had this every morning. Of course, I typically woke up around 6am, went for a jog, ate breakfast around 6:45, (and chatted!), sat down for demos at 7:30 till 5 or so, ate dinner, checked out galleries, then returned for Open Torch and maybe helped break that down, meaning I was lucky to get to bed by midnight. Gathering isn't quite as exhausting as a Loren Stump seminar, but it's close. One bad thing about Gathering is you don't get much exercise. Beadmakers, like science fiction fen, tend to be large; hence the joke I heard while someone was handing out t-shirts ‘oh yes, the beadmaker's medium: XL’. The other thing is that even nonsmokers get blasted by the barfolk, which means one's clothes are good for one day, two at the absolute most. Other folks reported their classes on Ebay and marketing (Corina Tettinger?), Instructors’ Seminar (lots on liability issues) etc were good.
Still to come, in part II: the boro flameoff, the weirdest torch I ever used, and some cool stuff I did in Portland. But it's getting late, so that will be for later. And, oh yes, pix!
Main pages about my portland trip include the following:
- part i: summary, daytime programming (this page)
- part ii: summary, evening programming, plus Dietmar's Torch
- part iii: a bit about portland, especially its gardens
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
