“Don’t Listen To Us”

I have been pondering what to write as my next post here on Watch Me Create for a couple of days now. I had a few topics in mind but I wasn’t really coming up with anything concrete. I was out at my torch tonight and then it hit me. My topic was right at my fingertips. My topic is not going to be a new technique or some great new glass I was working with. The title describes the topic well, “Don’t Listen To Us”.

This is geared toward newer lampworkers but again I feel that what I write can cover any art form. This is also geared toward anyone who has ever not ventured into unknown territory because someone, somewhere told them it couldn’t be done.

We in the lampworking community are frequently asked advice by people who are just starting out. The lampworking community as a whole is the most open, honest and helpful artistic group I have ever been involved in. I am always amazed at how freely artists will give information or teach their techniques to anyone who asks. I owe a great deal to all those patient dear artists who put up with my silly questions when I first started.

I would like to tell the newer lampworkers and those that generally only procede after seeking out advice from a more experienced lampworker: Do Not Listen to Us! I am not a great lampworker but I do have experience at the torch. I believe the next time someone asks me for advice, I will help them all I can and then at the very end I will tell the person: Now do not listen to a word I have said. Gather your glass, sit at your torch and jump headlong into glass working with total abandon.

Now I want to set a few things straight before I proceed. There are some very wise glass workers out there. They have a huge body of knowledge and it is in our best interest to learn from those that have gone before us. There are new tools and glass developed frequently and it is a good thing to share the knowledge we learn. There are awesome teachers out there and lamp working as a whole would be a lot less exciting and perhaps a bit stagnant if it were not for those people who are so willing to share their knowledge.

So am I putting forth a contradiction? Absolutely not. What I am saying is, learn from those around you but forge your own way at the same time. Do not allow people to tell you that something can’t be done. Or this type of bead can only be made this way etc. Learn from others and then expand on what you have learned. Push the boundaries and see what is out there.

There are people making beads on hot head torches that a large percent of hot head owners would say can’t be done. There are people making beads with other materials most would say are impossible to combine with glass. There are people taking hot shop techniques and working them on a micro scale to produce genius works of art. Can you imagine if these artists would have listened when they were told “it can’t be done”? Or when they were told ” you make a bead this way”, they did just that and never pushed new techniques.

This relates to the beads I was making today because I was told a long time ago you can’t do it. I was making small hearts out of transparent red and then encasing them. It is no big deal and a lot of people do this. I was however long ago told by someone whose knowledge I respect, “you can’t encase transparent reds”. I tried just to see what would happen. I expected failure but I wanted to see exactly how it fails and figure out why. Well it didn’t fail, it is not a hard thing to do at all come to find out. The encased red does not crack after all. This person had a bad experience with encasing and passed that experience on to me in hopes of saving me time and effort.

For those people that teach and pass on knowledge, please continue to do so with fervent passion. For those that seek advice, keep seeking it, you can learn a lot when people pass their lifetime of experience on to you. However nothing beats, your own experience, your own experimentation and self education through hands on testing and application.

The next time someone hands you a map of a certain technique etc. and points to an area and says “here be dragons”, don’t back down from those dragons. Maybe, just maybe, you may be the next dragon slayer and you can teach the rest of us something new. If there is a danger zone in glass that people are saying you can’t go there, I say, be a rebel and try it. What have you got to lose? Think of what you might gain.

Otter is a lampworker who blogs from the Pacific Northwest.