Fail Forward

The goblets workshop with Jeff Mack wasn't what I expected.

I'd been blowing pretty well in Philadelphia, not quite production cups, but I was finishing off the spring with thin, centered cups with color and avolios, blown feet, correct proportion. I took the class thinking that I had the basic bubble happening, and that now I'd build some stems, try some new techniques and move on. But I couldn't.

I was stuck - my hands weren't opening vessels, my blow partners weren't the same old Philly crew I knew like the back of my hand. My timing was off, I kept missing the beat. I was too cold, and a year in front of the glory hole couldn't warm up my glass. Maybe the laws of physics were actually being applied differently in my corner of the studio. The information I was receiving in demonstrations and museum lectures was overwhelming and awe-inspiring. Watching the other students, seeing their work product was humbling. Quietly listening to the conversations in the lunchrooms, with these glassworkers from all over the nation, even the world, sharing information and technique, was every idealistic thing we ever dreamed about on the front stoop of our tiny hot shop in Philadelphia and never even came close to achieving in our own little world. Everything was changing, my head restructured the way I was thinking about glass. I just couldn't do anything with it.

By Wednesday, I was beginning to wonder if I could ever do this - glass - if after four years of giving it all I've got, I couldn't get in the studio enough, practice enough, problem solve enough to fix this, to make a stupid cup happen. The few pros I knew back in Philly were right - this can't happen without being in the studio and working your ass off everyday. The work you put in to pay your rent and then get to the studio doesn't count. It won't teach your hands a thing. That night I rallied and banged out a nice enough cup with tall avolios and an optic stem, but by Thursday, it was gone. Some cruel little voice in my head told me not to quit my day job, but I already had.

I asked Jeff Mack what I could do to be a better glassblower, and I think I was waiting for official approval to go back to the hobbyist corner forever. He talked about about a book called Zen and the Art of Guitar Playing and told me to look it over and replace "guitar-playing" with "glassblowing". He said that frustration was just part of the process, that it would never end. And something clicked, I remembered something else entirely. A shock of recognition.

After all was done, and I settled in Philadelphia, after the first year there, I had just started my first intermediate class under Chris. I had been blowing glass for four months. I went to Brooklyn to chill at Coney Island and crash with Gregory. I talked glass half the weekend, like a naive little thing. We were outside on the concrete steps in a summer night, just like growing up, and I said that I had never failed so miserably at anything in my life, and that I thought I might have achieved enlightenment.

It's been a long time since I thought about enlightenment, but now I think I remember why I'm here.

So the Jeff Mack class was about countless failures, open possibilities, a series of minor epiphanies, and small victories in the form of a series of ampolinas and twisty cups in the box. Plus one sweet, tall cup.

Thoughts on art school

Everyone here has been to art school and trained in glass. The people I work with in the seasonal workshops, up to the head tech, the teachers, the students and the hangers-on. Even when they started gathering up in some other setting, in studio work or in public access places, they all went to art school for this.

In Philly, there seem to be two views on art school, coming from the professionals or the close-enoughs. The first is: "Art school was awesome! I learned so much and I still hang out with my homies." The second is: "Art school is full of punk-ass kids and wannabe bitches." Regardless of which view a person takes, the common factor between the people of either mindset is generally that they have all been to (or in one notable exception, taught in) art schools. But I never met any of them as art students anyway. By the time I met all of these people, they were professionals; they were teaching the classes that I was taking in public access settings, and taking the students out drinking, telling us all how life is. And the thing that would separate us, that makes them able to let me know how life is when, technically, I did throw down just as hard as anyone else, the difference between us is the training, and the blowslots subsidized by a university, an educational setting. The time in the studio to experiment instead of the time spent working your ass off to get by, and then maybe get to the studio. Here in Corning, I'm sort of dropped in the middle of all these kids I'm working with, most of whom are still in school or freshly out, and they are all, well, fresh. It's a good word for it.

So when I learned to blow glass, I started late, I was 24 years old. I didn't start out with a lot of money. I was actually nearly broke and spent the last of my cash on a four week class. I sold my car to get the money for an apartment in Philadelphia, I cut murrine and color, swept the floor, assisted in beginner classes, narrated demonstrations, and cleaned the bathroom at the local studio to make enough in trade to take classes, I cleaned buildings and hauled stuff for my landlord for extra cash on the side, to make ends meet while I was coming up in the world. One hundred hours of work on my weekends and evenings got me a single class, in a class we worked on our own work once a week. The classes were three hours long, and geared towards hobbyists. I made one piece a week, if I didn't break it, not that it ever mattered. I quit glass twice, neither time lasted for longer than two weeks. I didn't know if I would ever be able to get it together enough to plan my own sculptures well, or to make a goblet. I've got a long way to go. Because studio glassworking requires practice, observation and experimentation, and in a studio without resources, classes geared towards hobbyists only, all I really knew about glass was that I hadn't seen anything yet. Experimentation was impossible, unaffordable.

Glass is about sheer force of will. A professional glassworker once told me there was no way to learn to work with glass without being in the studio everyday. The pros can be a little dismissive, but he was right. There's a reason that I ( a public-access trained glassworker) in a minority here. Getting here was heartbreaking.

I could dismiss the art students like some of the pros do, but I don't. I get annoyed when certain someones with art degrees skip the line for a beginning teaching or production assistant job that maybe I wanted, when they haven't got the skills or good sense to blow a simple cylinder. But most of them are pretty good while I'm still pretty mediocore in the real world, and when all of these younger kids here are talking amongst themselves about all the numerous ways to cook food in a glass studio, about the things they've tried that didn't necessarily work out, I appreciate that and wish I had the resources to do it that way. What it comes down to is that everything I've seen in the last month, or in the magazines, the contemporary glass that imitates bones, dirt, fruit, stone, objects, creatures, abstractions, all the studio glass that's come about since the sixties, all of it is that result of cheap energy, ubiquitous studios, a sense of experimentation, the willingness to share technique and information, and this is all in part fostered by the university system. And the time, all the time in the world to figure out what questions they want to ask, and then to find the answers. The kids here all know people in common, whether they're from Ohio or California, and in the end, we all speak the same language.

What this soliloquy is really about is how I'm going to find the money and the time to make a body of work just so that eventually, maybe, I can get back to somewhere like that.