In the Brain of the Creator: Lisa Rippee Introduction

I’ve been asked more than a few times, “What goes on in the brain of the creator of those mouths?”

A little over three years ago, having been a right-brain person trying to fit into a left-brain world far too long, I would have answered “total chaos.” Life was a constant struggle to find where I belonged in this crazy working world. I’ve been blessed with the dexterity of being a fast typist, a fast learner, with the ability to tackle skills such as court reporting and medical transcription. But let me tell you, that type of blessing is also a curse to someone with a little condition I call right-brain-itis.

I’d come home from a miserable workday to my latest creative endeavor. Oil painting, drawing, sculpting clay; anything that could allow me to delve into the one place I felt at home. Right-brain thinking. Meditating through the entire process, hoping that I would someday find a place to belong.

Then in March of 2005, I picked up a torch and some glass rods. Having been accused of thinking backwards most of my adult life, I found an art form that thrived from my brand of thinking. Instantly I knew a sense of belonging. I knew the years of meditation on my quest had yielded an answer.

Self-taught for the first year and half, I learned how to work with my lack of technical skill. “So what if I can’t make a perfectly round bead,” I’d tell myself. “I’ll sculpt something that requires asymmetry and a bit of imperfection. ”

Less than a year later, I left that left-brain world for good, and started working for a local stained glass store. I can attest to the joy a person feels when they stop fighting their nature.

While I have taken classes with some of the greats, Sharon Peters, Tink Martin and John Cramer, Brent Graber, and Loren Stump, and am acquiring technical skill, I still find my backward thinking quite useful in my glass work.

These mouths were born of continual mistakes that I turned to my advantage. I still can’t make a perfectly round bead, but I’ve decided I really don’t care. I’ll just continue letting my backward brain come up with strange and unusual creations, and letting my mind do what comes naturally. Create!

You can see more of Lisa Rippee’s work at her Etsy Store.

Sculptural practice - Just having fun!

I’ve been keeping up with my sculptural practice and been having fun doing it. My latest venture has been blobby aliens. In my first post on sculpture you saw I was having some trouble making sure that I didn’t let parts of my beads get too cool while I was working on other parts. I decided to go back to simpler sculptures to practice insurance heating more. Hence the blobby aliens were born.

They aren’t very complex but they were good practice in keeping a bead warm while not loosing definition in features. As you can see from some of the legs on some of them I still need more practice but making these little weird guys is fun so that won’t be hard to manage

Heather blogs from her home in Watertown, WI. If you would like to see more of her work you can check out her site here.

Flying Slugs and Moody Introspection

When I last posted, which was some time ago (sorry about that) I was making boro squids and struggling to come up with a second less time consuming design. Enter the Flying Slug.

This design requires much less prep work than the squid. Basically it is a tentacle bent into a “c” shape with an added mouth, eyeball and flippers. below is a side view.

Amazingly enough, this shape works well as a pendant. It’s back lies against your chest and the face stays facing out much better than I thought it would. I could make one in under an hour which is “in the zone” for me work time wise.

Unfortunately, the design has a major problem which is that it is much more fragile than the squid. Though I’ve managed to keep my own slug intact for quite some time, one slug that I accidently dropped while I was taking it’s picture did not survive…at all. That was a sad moment for me because I realized that it wasn’t a viable design.

Generally speaking, selling things that are that fragile makes me really nervous. Of course my nervousness was overridden by my desire to get feedback on my design so I did list one of these on Ebay. Stan from Australia bought it and I know he’ll take good care of it.

Here’s the thing about me, though. Even though beadmaking is all about keeping this time and money balance so I can continue on with my remarkably easy and fun job I am equally driven by people’s reaction to my work. I’d be much more likely to pursue something that was really time consuming if the end product was more impressive to people.

Squids and slugs are exponentially more difficult for me to make than mask beads but you can’t really tell that by looking at them. If I step outside myself and just look at the pieces I keep thinking that people who do not work with boro don’t really know what’s involved with them and people who do work with boro would wonder what was the big deal about the squids and slugs–they don’t look that hard to do. What is that anyway? A turtle? A butterfly? I think I was the biggest fan of the new designs.

Of course the Ebay people liked them. People who are up for something strange liked them quite well, bless them. I guess in the end after figuring out how to put these guys together (that’s the fun part) my results just weren’t impressive enough (to the public at large and to me) to warrant spending that much more time on these guys. I do love my squids. Time making them was time well spent.

Squids and Squid By-Products

All the borosilicate tentacle making from last month’s episode led to two new creatures: Space Squids and Flying Slugs. I’ll discuss the squids first since the slugs were kind of an off shoot of them.

Though the end result may appear silly, creating an entirely new creature requires serious thought not to just the creature’s appearance but my effeciency in creating them and the durability of it’s design.

All I knew when I started out with these guys was that I wanted to create a wearable sculpture, not a solid boro pendant. For durability I decided to make as much of it solid as I could and then be sure to attatch all the tentacles together as much as possible. I would have liked to have the tentacles waving “Hello” and floating out in space but that would compromise the pendant’s durability. I didn’t want a bunch of squid coming back to me in pieces.

Space Squids are composed of a solid head which is made from various frits, powders and clear pyrex crammed into a 1″ marble mold, and tentacles which are made from colored rod or mixed colors encased with heavy wall tubing.

The reptile murrine eye, which I made from a recipe I found in Milon Townsend’s book Advanced Flameworking, has to be encased in clear before applying. I encase pretty much anything that has to be fused to anything else in clear. With the boro I feel that things stick together easier that way. I can’t tell you for sure that that’s a fact it just the way things seem to me.

All of this preparation really adds up time wise. I’ve spent up to two hours on a squid. I create most of my soft glass beads in less than one hour. I’ve spent two hours on a soft glass bead before and the result was a lot less goofy looking than a one-eyed, 5 tentacled squid. So the next thought to cross my mind about these guys was is this design going to be worth all the extra time and gas it will take to make them? I love the squids but they’re goofy. Is anyone else going to want to wear these? That thought was promptly stomped on by another thought about how fun and interesting working with boro was. Coming into the studio to work in the morning was exciting because I didn’t know what was going to happen that day. I decided that I was just going to have to get faster at making the squids. Then everything would be cool.

Here’s a side trip that’s a little OT–My first squid was pretty hideous looking but I wore it proudly. It was durable and it was wearable. Accomplishment! Making that first squid really got my brain going about all the stuff you can make out of this shock resistant glass. That realization side tracked me and I got obsessed with making something bigger out of seperate components. What I wanted was a dainty goblet type vessel out of which guests could drink this horrible Chinese liquor (Moutai)we’ve got lying around at the house. After about 4 days of breaking and fixing various parts I finally did it.

Only the stem and the base and part of the glass are pictured. The whole thing is about 6 or 7″ tall and it incorporates the first squid that I made mostly because that was the only thing I had lying around to make it out of. It’s still intact, which is nothing short of miracle.

But I digress…after making my Moutai glass I got back to Squid making. I was never able to shave a lot of time off of their production so I tried to come up with something simpler–The Flying Slug.

Explore New Depths

I took my Hoochy-Coochy Fish for a swim in the Mermaids Grotto! Art Bead Scene, a team blog devoted to artist made beads, has been sponsoring a monthly themed bead challenge.

This challenge isn’t necessarily about showing off your art bead creations, but showing off your use of an art bead (yours or someone else’s) in a finished piece. Last months theme was “Mermaid’s Grotto“.

I spend a lot of time making beads, but I rarely find the time to string them up into anything, so I have enjoyed using their challenges as a kick in the pants to motivate me to actually do something with my beads.

I considered attempting to make a mermaid bead, but I found that thought a bit intimidating, as there are bead makers out there that make phenomenal mermaids and I’m not much of a sculptural bead maker.

Instead I decided to play around with making a microscope slide pendants. I have been enamored with microscope slide collage pendants since my girl scout troop made them a few years ago and have been looking for an excuse to try them again. Layering numerous slides with paper cut-outs makes fun little three dimensional pendants. I couldn’t dig up any mermaid-y paper cut-outs co I decided to paint my mermaid and include an inspiration message: “Explore New Depths”.

“Explore New Depths” is great mantra for my creative life. I am always striving to step out of my box and try new things, this necklace illustrates it well. Fish beads, something I don’t normally do, painting a mermaid pendant (I’m not a painter!), and an asymmetric necklace design so I could highlight my diving fish were all new explorations for me. My left brain personality tends to use asymmetry in my jewelry design, so creating something asymmetric was was a “New Depth” for me!

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!