Musings on Working Hard

New glasses-- new look

I am finally spending a lot of time in my studio, and it’s been amazingly hard to get there.

As you may know if you’ve read my previous posts, my life has been pretty disrupted for the last year or so. My husband and I are separated. I’ve moved from the inner burbs of Chicago to the far outer burbs, where it is incredibly gorgeous and incredibly inconvenient/isolated. And I spent 6 months pursuing an apparently perfect job which I did not ultimately land, so I’ve been anxiety-ridden about where my rent will be coming from over time.

It takes a huge amount of energy adjusting to changes like these, and that drain really cut down on my productivity, at least at creative metalsmithing. I cannot say that I wasted any of my time, or any more of it than I absolutely had to to keep my sanity. I just didn’t manage much time in the studio.

I’m telling you all this because it seems to me, from the responses to my earlier writings, that I am kind of an artistic Everyman. That is, every time I express my innermost, secret, obscure feelings or thoughts, I get a raft of messages saying “Yes! Yes! Me too!” Most of me is delighted to find out I’m not the only one, and maybe a small part is a smidge let down to find that I’m not so special after all.

I wrote earlier about “embracing my inner fussbudget”. Well, I’m also embracing my inner Everyman, and putting these experiences out there in hopes of helping you, too, feel less “special”, or anyway less isolated.

So here are some things that have happened lately.

I’ve discovered I can paint. I always thought I couldn’t.  For almost a year, I’ve been doing pastels, and not only can I do it, it’s easy. Go figure. I just love the results—I feel like Pygmalion, who fell in love with his own sculpture.

At the same time, I’ve finally resumed work on a piece that I started early last spring, when I was at a 2-week residency at the Ragdale Foundation, and it’s really hard. This is a very, very complex “teapot”. I put that in quotes because it is a sculpture, and it won’t hold water, let alone tea. Tea, for me, is a metaphor for comforting ritual, intimate personal satisfaction, the things you do for yourself or for those immediately around you. You cannot have or share tea over the internet, or the phone, or even over a fence.

This piece consists of a set of three interlocking pins that are the rooms of a house. In the final construction, they will sit under a triangular dome of pierced silver in the form of a forest, topped with a faceted sunstone set in gold (the piece is called “House in the Woods”). I’ve just nearly finished this part. I designed it long before I moved to an actual house in the woods, and the house itself is entirely imaginary.

The dome and the pins (folded into a freestanding triangle) will sit on a base that will have a spout and handle made of fossil coral that looks like tree branches. This is really the easiest of the three sections, and I’m working on it now.

My bench right now

I’m very relieved to have apparently finished the dome (I finished the pins months ago, at Ragdale). It only has 9 soldering operations, but with all that delicate piercing, I really thought I would probably melt something. Especially since there is gold involved, and gold—especially 14K—is really easy to melt. But I think I’m in the clear, unless I find something I have to take apart and redo—I did that once already with the “sun” that is the knob on top.

I’m telling you all this just so you don’t think you’re alone when you struggle with your work. I’m pretty good at this stuff, but I’ve watched videos on Orchid of a goldsmith demo’ing how to make this or that, and it looks so easy! He doesn’t melt it, or turn it black trying vainly to get the solder to flow, or have to re-do the finish because he scratched it somehow. I’m here to tell you, I sweat bullets over this stuff, a lot of the time. And believe me, it’s a lot of time!

When this object is finished, I will post pictures here, and all over the place, so keep an eye out if you’re curious.

I am also working out ways to add jewelry to my pastels, turning them into mixed-media pieces. I’m pretty pumped about that, though there’s engineering to work out.

One last bit of evidence that all that hard, often boring work I was doing when I was NOT getting into the studio is starting to pay off. A place in Oregon posted today that they are looking for workshop presenters. Because I have already compiled images, class descriptions, resume, even an audio clip about my teaching, I was able to send a response almost instantaneously. I may not get the gig, but it sure made me feel very professional and on top of things.

Boy, I needed that.

Tagged as: artist's residency, fossil coral, fussbudget, gold, house in the woods, pastel painting, Ragdale Foundation, silver, sunstone, tea pot, teapot