…MAYBE SOMEBODY WILL BUY IT. Making stringer, circa 1983: nail posts onto board, put board on potter’s wheel, gather glass from furnace, turn on wheel…
In Bullseye’s second decade, the 1980s and early 1990s, the founders’ obsession with fusing continued to drain the company’s resources. There was almost no market for their dream.
While other US glass companies were getting fat selling Tiffany-esque glasses to Taiwanese lamp factories, the Bullseye gang was designing the testing method for compatibility, writing a primer called Glass Fusing Book One, formulating shelf primers and overglazes and sticking “Tested Compatible” labels on a warehouse full of glass that was going nowhere.
GATEWAY TO NIGHTMARE. While most were still using frit one grain at a time for hummingbird eyes, at the factory Narcissus Quagliata was laying it on with a lawn spreader. First draft of “Gateway to Light”
And to make it worse, the partners kept inviting other commercially-challenged characters into the factory to play with their products. Klaus Moje, Narcissus Quagliata, eventually Rudi Gritsch - over the years the stream of artists working at the factory turned into a series of flash floods. And with the artists came more ideas for “essential” products - threads of glass, frits, powders, thin sheets - for which no real market yet existed.
At the same time that the factory’s bottom line was plummeting and the company founders were in marriage counseling to try to salvage their partnership (they didn’t), a chemistry set culture was settling in that would define who Bullseye would be for years to come: a place where research would daily mug finance. And where the hat of the scientist would look a lot like an artist’s beret.
By 1991 this ongoing research was formalized into a department called R & D - until a visitor pointed out that, as quickly as the discoveries were going into books, articles and classes, the department ought to be called Research and Education instead.
Tomorrow I’ll let you know what that idea looks like today.
