The Art of Joy Alyssa Day

I don’t know if it will be completely successful or not, but it combines things from years past that have been, so should be well on it’s way to bringing us some more sales. I thought you would get some insight and some tips and hints from it. If you have ideas to add, please comment!!!

Recently I was asked to produce visible light spectrum pendant necklaces. The lady who asked runs a wonderful scientific website called ScienceMall and she had been selling pendants that claimed to be spectrum, but didn’t have the entire visible spectrum in them. When she called and talked with the sellers, they didn’t understand what she meant. They were not scientists, not educated about visible light spectrum versus simple rainbow or color charts.

It’s a pretty cool thing, really, and I’m honored to help spread the word and teach the difference.

It was only a matter of time before our skills producing the blown glass planets for our mobiles, orrery, sculptures and ornaments would join up with our new line of wine bottle stoppers.

We decided to couple the two and make Planetary Wine Bottle Stoppers. We figured the techniques would be pretty much identical, so it would be a breeze! Wrong! The various planetary glass pieces we’ve blown before were hollow, and blown out much bigger. We had to decorate the pieces while they were still fairly small, but then as they blew out, the details would get larger and look like what it was supposed to look like.

Last summer, I went through the most frightening thing I have ever experienced, the California Basin Complex Wildfire that chewed through much of Big Sur.  I had seen wildfires on tv, but had never experienced one in person until then. My partner, BJ, detailed the advance of the fire in photos on his blog as it was happening. We were advised to evacuate, but as we tried to figure out what we could take with us and what we could continue to do as the kind of artists we are if we were to leave, and especially if our studio did not survive, we decided that we needed to stay here and defend our livelihood as best we could.

The new jewelry line came about fairly rapidly, but the website for them took a little longer (isn’t that always the case?). The site is now LIVE! – http://glasssculpture.org/artglass/jewelry/

We decided to add it to our Glass Sculpture site, since the technique doesn’t match up with my Reverse Glass painting, nor does it follow the techniques used in the marbles & wine stoppers.

We’re branching out so much even we get confused sometimes! But it’s all good.  So far, we have wondrous pendants:

Iris Pendant

and captivating Earrings:

Grass Earrings

I grew up watching my dad making all kinds of wonderful things down in our basement. He was (and still is) a magnificent silversmith. He would take the odd rocks that he’d find and break and polish them into beautiful gems and then mount them for rings, pendants, and bracelets.  The basement cave where he had his soldering iron and all the various parts and pieces set up was a mystical treat for me when I was so young.  I’m sure the interest I had is part of what built in me to be confident enough to build and create all the nifty stuff I do.

You may have heard me beefing on Twitter or Facebook about a recent “Crappy Client” that we had. I’d like to elaborate on that some.

What makes a client crappy? These days, you’d think any client would be welcome, especially for artists who have seen their markets dry up quicker than most “needed” commodities. For a “starving artist”, any client is a good client. Right? Well, no. There are some clients that are just bad people, and they want to inflict their sorrow/curse on everyone they deal with. This is especially hard for an artist to take. Artists tend to be more emotional, more committed to their work, and much less able to think that it’s “Nothing Personal—Just Business” when it comes to anything related to their creations.

August 20, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

21st Century Makeover for Historic Instrument

CARMEL VALLEY, CA — Artists B.E. Johnson and Joy Alyssa Day announced today the completion of a major art installation at the College of San Mateo, San Mateo, California. After over a year of design, development and construction, Celestial Gears, a working model of our solar system was unveiled in the new Planetarium building, bringing new form to the historic scientific instrument, the Orrery.

The Celestial Gears Blown Glass Orrery

Recently, and from multiple sources, I’ve gotten urged to use our glasswork in jewelry. So I did a little research online to see what type of glass jewelry was already out there. We don’t particularly like doing the same thing that hoards of others are doing. We like having our work be unique. I found a lot of various necklaces, etc, but none of it really looked like the type of designs that we would/have come up with.

As we continue our orrery project, it is time to blow the glass planets. As the whole piece is only 6 feet in diameter, that means we have less than 3 feet to fit in 8 planets (they didn’t want Pluto).  To get the planets to fit, be relative scale (impossible to be “actual” scale), and not clunk into each other, the inner planets need to be fairly small.