New Work and a Gallery!

Coffee in the Chicago skyline mug, "Ada" by the National *was* on iTunes, but then we had to have a big family discussion about breakfast. Looks like they're having cheese danish. I'm going to have a toasted everything bagel with creamy Jiff peanut butter. Back to "Ada".

It's Sunday, I post because I write. I finish my web article for Profitable Glass and send them all the photos for both the Siyeh Studio profile and the print and web articles on product market viability. Yesterday I fired several new pieces that I hoped would be three new colorways for the Morceaux de Verre series. I peeked in Big Bertha when I was at the studio a couple of minutes ago and was less than thrilled. I hope they look better out in the light and cleaned up. It's true that I'm stretching my comfort level and going to combinations that are more edgy and complex and less obvious and safe. I just hope I don't have a kiln full of failures.

The glass in the piece above right is a revival of one of my first color combinations, "Conundrum", reworked for flow and with a bit of black added. I was so excited about how it turned out that I may have gone a little overboard adding black to other pieces (specifically the ones in the kiln right now). I'll have to wait till Bertha is cooler than 248 degrees to really see. The "Conundrum" above is in a new collaborative piece with Elliott Metal Works called "Locked". It's about 28" tall and 18" wide based on the glass size--I haven't measured it yet for final dimensions.

Another new piece that came out of last week is "Float", shown at left. The glass in it is 24" wide by 16" tall and the entire piece isn't much bigger--though over two and a half feet of glass 3/8" thick is already pretty big. "Float" is a fun piece because it gives me a huge open canvas to flow color over. Colorways like "Cosmos" (shown) work especially well because there is enough room for all the colors to get a turn to romp around. My previous pieces of this size were the hanging panels and they had to have holes drilled in them to display them. Holes for the sake of hanging rather than beauty feel like desecration to me and I'm glad to be able to avoid them in this piece. Thanks to Debbie Suchy of Eclectic Galleries in Jacksonville for the request to do a big horizontal piece in a simple stand. I can't wait to take this one to ACRE in a couple of weeks.

The work over the past week to get ready for the Profitable Glass photos had an unintended bonus--it brought me a lot closer to being ready for a studio grand opening. Probably the biggest feeling of accomplishment and completion came with the painting and furnishing of the gallery (shown at right). When you walk in the front door of the studio, it is the first room you enter. The walls are a soft grey with a subtle white glaze over them and the lighting is all low-wattage halogen. Once the floor is cleaned and mopped with Quick Shine it will really look like a professional public art glass gallery. Time to have an open house...

But now it's time to get writing, photo-editing and planning for the display at ACRE. It's only a few weeks till the show and I still have to figure out what I'm going to display my work on besides the walls. Ho boy.