The Art of Joy Alyssa Day

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...

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!!!"

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.

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 working for a number of months, in vain, trying to create two matching cast glass sinks for a client, that would fit into her already made countertop, she canceled the project. I was having failure after failure with those darned sinks - getting the colors to match what she wanted, then trying to get the cast piece to drop through a mold to the right shape for her countertop, faucet and knobs.

Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is when you keep trying the same experiment over and over again expecting different results. I feel like I have been living proof of this definition for the past 6 months.

As I was driving up to get the mail and newspaper today, a black cat jumped out of the bushes into the road. It looked just like our small black cat, Mo, who is known to wander, so I pulled over and got out to go get her. Up by the mailboxes is just waaaay too far away for her to be wandering. Mo has a pink tracking collar to help us find her, but I didn't see it as I was getting out of my truck.