The Art of Joy Alyssa Day

Idon’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.

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.

I really wish I had more time to myself to paint these little watercolors. I am quite enjoying them. I think it’s not only the learning a new process thing, but also that I don’t have to make them look like anything. Most of our art pieces have to end up looking like something (a rocket or portrait…)  or performing some function (like holding up a table). I have always wanted to be more loose in my paintings, to paint or create more abstract or impressionist pieces, but that so rarely happens.

I made my own gear yesterday!!  I’m so proud of it I could just burst.

A little background – I’m building on orrery (model of the solar system) for the astronomy department of a college in San Mateo, CA.  We’ve built similar things, but of course, every new project requires new skills and stuff that we’ve never done before. For this piece – http://celestialgears.com/, it is going to be motorized with a computer driving the planets with correctly timed orbits. The whole piece is 6 feet in diameter.

Solar System Model - Orrery