What Would You Do - Conclusion

Under this title in a previous post I posed the question of whether or not it was ethical to reproduce one of your own pieces that you'd previously sold as one-of-a-kind. I read the responses and partly because of the them I went ahead and re-did the piece. I matched it pretty closely but I couldn't get the exact Rondel from Blenko glass that I'd used in the original:
http://www.homestudioartglass.com/images/2_rivers.jpg
(That company is so strange. I mean Blenko not Home Studio. Well, maybe we're a little strange too.) But I did manage to put together a piece that was nearly identical and when the check arrived I sent it off. It was purchased as a birthday present for an executive director at the National Association of Clean Water Agencies.

Well a few weeks later they sent me an e-mail and said they'd found something else for this coworker's birthday and would I take the piece back and refund their money. I did. I just thought I'd let you know how it turned out. Sooner or later you see everything.

j

Can You Pick And Choose?

A while back I had a potential customer offer me a commission to do a piece that I had absolutely no interest in doing. I've done them before, these 'match my sofa' commissions, and I've always gritted my teeth, held my nose, made the piece, collected my fee and moved on. But there was something about this one that just hurt my head.

It wasn't obscene, satanic or blasphemous (now THAT would have been interesting! ha.), it was just mundane in the extreme. I knew it would just suck the life out of me.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking; how pretentious, who does this guy think he is? Well, I'm nearly 65 and I've been doing this for over 30 years and I'm tired in a lot of ways. Physically, standing bent over a work table all day hurts and at the end of the day it's hard to walk. But even more, I've lost a lot of the enthusiasm I had as a young man. The thrill of making something beautiful out of nothing but your imagination and getting someone to not only agree that it is beautiful but to pay you for it could keep me going through some truly difficult jobs.

Or maybe it's that I'm not doing art shows anymore. In the past they always charged my batteries. Meeting the public and doing a little selling was energizing, plus I'd come home with lots of ideas and plenty of validation. But art shows are for younger folks.

So I blew him off. Actually, I handed him off to another shop. But in so doing I made a promise to myself to do interesting work whenever possible. How I'm going to accomplish this I don't know but it's got to be art or I'm just a hooker and in it only for the money.

j

So, what do you do?

Do you make one-of-a-kind stained glass pieces? Unique original works of art? Or do you think of your work as generic and decorative? And what exactly is the difference?

I have always wondered about the "signed and numbered" phenomenon. Painters and photographers do this as a way of getting good prices for what are essentially copies of their work. It's an understood contract between buyer and seller that there are a set and limited number of copies and therefore each is worth more than just the cost of production plus profit; they have value as a "semi-unique" art work. But it's still a copy. So I've always thought there was something not quite right about that whole enterprise but I'm not exactly sure what it is.

Several years ago I decided that I was no longer an artisan but an artist. I naively thought that what this meant was I would do only signed, one-of-a-kind pieces and I advertised them as such on the website. I eventually sold them, not on our site but at art shows where I did not claim any one-of-a-kind status for them. But I kept the photos up on the web as examples of my work.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by someone who wanted one of the pieces on the web-page and I told her it had been sold. She asked me to make another one. Now, to be frank, this was our first possible commission in quite some time, so I agreed to draw up another pattern - I had thrown the original away - and recreate the piece. I felt that since the original buyer received no promise that I would never make a copy, I'm within my rights to do so. Or am I?

So...what would/do you do? Would you tell them that it's impossible, you can't recreate an original? Or do you consider every piece unique and one-of-a-kind in it's own way?

j

http://www.homestudioartglass.com

"Go Back To The Drawing Board?"

I may have created the impression that we're getting out of the business (Business? What business?) in my last post and that's definitely not the case. And like David said there seems to be a slight warming trend lately, at least the phone is ringing (I was getting ready to call the phone company and see if they'd cut it off.)

I was talking awhile back about designing with Photoshop and it's progeny like PhotoDeluxe, Photoshop Elements, Limited etc. Here you can take pics of your glass and "cut them out" on the computer and put them in your design to get a real accurate picture of what the finished product will look like, and eliminate that "what was I thinking" moment that occurs sometimes when you first see the light come through your piece. But what I was really excited about was that you could send the prospective client a virtual photo of what their window would look like before you scored the first piece of glass.

I always found it amazing that a client would agree to turn loose of some large bills on the basis of a colored pencil sketch. Now I'm pretty good with a pencil and can come up with some real pretty sketches but still it always seemed like I was saying "use your imagination and give me 1500 dollars and I'll put this in your home"

So the Photoshop stuff seemed to be the perfect tool for approaching design possibilities with the client.

But here's the thing; I never lost a customer when I was handing them the finished pencil sketch. Once it got to that stage I had them. When I started doing computer design I began to loose some. Not many, but enough to make me wonder. Maybe it's coincidence. Or maybe it's just that our prices are higher now. But could it be that the customer likes to see the work of the hand rather than the microchip; to know that you're an artist first and a crafter second. I still do the Photoshop thing but I make sure my customer sees something I've sketched whenever possible.

j


http://www.homestudioartglass.com

My, How Times Have Changed

I know I haven't put anything down in awhile, but it seems to me that my stained glass business is in a much different place than when I first started this blog. Back then I was talking about being 'covered up' and now it's as if someone threw a switch about a year ago and turned off my business. I've had a few small jobs that make me keep the doors open but really, It's never been this dry in over 20 years.

I'm sure it's because Stained Glass is so dependent on the housing market and of course that's collapsed completely. And also when it's time to cut back on expenses well, who really needs the stuff I make anyway.

And that has always been the source of a certain amount of ambivalence on my part. As a carpenter I always knew that I was providing a necessary service. It's a noble profession, hell, Jesus was a carpenter. But no one in the bible, or anywhere else in literature as far as I can tell, was a Stained Glass artisan.

Of course I'm an artist, but I've never had that consuming artistic fire, that "I would die for my art!" attitude. It's always been something I enjoyed doing and was good at but I never felt I had anything to "say" in art.

And Stained Glass artisans, with a few - very few actually - notable exceptions, are decorative artists at best. We decorate homes. We are often charged with reproducing a beloved scene, or a quilt pattern, or perhaps a family pet. We are constantly being constrained to match the carpet or the sofa or the bedspread for God's sake. The first time I was given free rein to design a transom to suit the home owner's personality, I was so intoxicated with the prospect that I was frozen into immobility for a time. OK, I know this only happens to us in the lower ranks; Narcissus Quagliata probably never gets the "Oh and I love peach, could you put some peach in it?" rap.

But really this feeling that what I was producing was essentially landfill was at it's peak during art festival season. Now, we never did a lot of art shows 4 or maybe 5 a year at the most. But the stuff we had to crank out just depressed the hell out of me. In order to hit those price points below $30 we had to produce simple designs with few pieces that could be cranked out like an assembly line. I was always trying to reduce the number of cuts, usually degrading the design in order to keep pieces affordable. We never really got into the little suction cup sun catchers but still...

Well now our situation has changed dramatically; we're much more financially secure and no longer do the art show circuit - thank God - and I'm looking to find a way to only do jobs that interest me. (not sure exactly how to go about that, can I just sniff and tell a client "So sorry, old chum, but this project bores me?") We have a few pieces in the Kentucky Artisan's Center in Berea and when - and if - the bug to produce items on spec hits I'll look to galleries to sell my work.

j

http://www.homestudioartglass.com

Stained Glass In The Bath?

Does it sound silly, putting a gorgeous Stained Glass window in the bathroom where so few people will be able to see it? It's certainly not the first room that comes to mind when you're thinking about a decorative window is it? But homes are getting bigger, and bigger homes have bigger windows and a window in the bath presents a privacy issue. You want the natural light but you don't want people being able to see in.

There are several window treatments that can solve the problem but many people are finding the most attractive one is Stained Glass. You can see some of the windows we have installed at: http//www.homestudioartglass.com/res and scroll down to Stained Glass in the Bath.

j

http://www.homestudioartglass.com

Custom Stained Glass II

Odering a window

Generally, when asked to do a custom piece, I like to visit the site where the window will be installed. In this way I can get a feel for the style of the home and see how the client's tastes run. Occasionally, I'll pick up a design idea from a piece of the architecture or some of the furnishings.

I'll also see how much light will be coming through and whether it is direct or indirect sunlight. Many people prefer cathedral glass (see the following paragraph) because it lets in more light and doesn't look as "heavy" as opalescent glass. But in direct sunlight, the color of cathedral can look washed out as if it has faded.

Opalescent or Cathedral?

The term "Stained Glass" originally referred to the silver stain fired onto the back of a piece of glass which gave it a color anywhere from deep amber to bright yellow. Now, however, it refers to any decorative colored glass assembled with lead or copper foil as well as to the sheets of colored glass themselves.

There are 2 basic kinds of colored sheet (stained) glass; Cathedral and Opalescent. Cathedral glass is glass that you can see through. The amount of the diffusion of the light can vary from completely obscure - where you can only perceive light and shadow, to glass that looks like clear glass with color. And while a lot of cathedral glass will appear to have no particular color without light coming through it, like when viewed from outside during the day, opalescent glass will show a color with or without transmitted light.

All of these factors must be taken into consideration when planning a Stained Glass window.

see also: http://www.homestudioartglass.com/your_window.htm