Zipping along....

The bead work is going MUCH faster on this one....it just seems like more fun and so I'm spending more hours at one time working on it. Its going to be AWESOME!!

We went to the Cherry Creek Art Festival yesterday afternoon. We've done this every year we've been back in Colorado, so its become a sort of 4th of July tradition. This year, however, I went with a real purpose in mind -- or several.

First of all, I had just read an article about "Artist Statements" in a trade magazine and I'm thinking that I need to revise ours. (In fact, I think we should have 2 separate ones since the style and approach to jewelry that each of us takes is so different.) Anyway, I actually spent time reading those statements in the booths of jewlery artists to see how each of them had presented their work.

I wanted to have a real close look at the work of other jewelry artists. The one artist that is working with the same combination of mediums that I do had some truly amazing pieces. She's using size 15 delicas to create some amazing multi strand bracelets. Unfortunately, we got to her booth as she was having her lunch, and she didn't seem inclined to talk with us about her work. All in all, however, I'm not convinced that her overall work is any better than mine.

Having decided that this was a test case at getting response to my own work, I wore one of my pieces. I got a lot of compliments on it. We spent quite a bit of time talking with a glass artist (he runs the University program in Wisconsin for glass). He was talking about which is more important: technique or vision. His feeling (and he teaches this way) is that vision is more important, you can always go and learn whatever that technique is that you need to translate your vision. This whole conversation made me think of one of my most favorite movies:

Playing music is supposed to be fun. It's about heart, it's about feelings, moving people and something beautiful, and it's not about notes on a page. I can teach you notes on a page, I can't teach you that other stuff. Play me the sunset(Mr Holland's Opus)

So, I think I'll just keep "playing the sunset" and see where it goes.

As we always do on this traditional outing, we walked through Saks Fifth Avenue and Nieman Marcus to take a look at what art jewelry they had on display. In both stores I was invited to give them my business card to be refered to their buying group. Now that would be an awesome event!!

Well, since I spent so much time "playing" yesterday, I guess I better get busy!!