Every year the same Bullseye people who build the furnaces, ladle the glass, pack the crates, teach the classes, stock the shelves, and answer the phones put together my favorite exhibition: Working Glass.

“Untitled” got my vote: a pair of over-sized pink nuts. From a young woman in the maintenance department.

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I was warned.

They told me that that I’d run out of babble; that I’d get bored with my own writing; that no one would comment (unless I picked a fight); that some ITiot would switch me over to different blog software and I’d have to learn a New Trick (just kidding, Chris)…etc etc.

My own special gray soup. A bit like Dunbeath harbor when the haar rolls in…

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Jiri Harcuba and April Surgent

A visit last week to the Hockney on Turner exhibition at the Tate Gallery reminded me of why I love to hear artists talk on the work of other artists. The perspectives are visceral.

“You can sense his arm moving. You can feel his body responding” is how Hockney reflects on Turner’s watercolor sketches.
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Just before I left Portland for North Lands, our Research & Education team embarked on the much-anticipated 6-week working session with Klaus Moje to assist him in producing an unprecedented series of glass panels for his summer 2008 exhibition at the Portland Art Museum.

Moments before getting on the plane at Heathrow to return to Portland I received this emailed souvenir of Klaus’s most recent time at Bullseye.
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It’s a factory. What can you expect? Sometimes you stumble onto stuff tucked away in dark corners that is truly scary.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised a couple of weeks ago when, as I was clambering through some dusty shelving up on a mezzanine above the R & E department, I happened upon what at first I mistook for the scalps of shrunken long-hairs. Until I decided they were the My Not-So-Little Pony Tails of some kiddy Vampira.

Slowly I realized the hirsute hangings that had wigged me out were glass. I was transfixed.

Confession: after 35 years inside the glass bubble, what increasingly grabs my attention are those objects that ride the slightly disturbing twin rails of beauty and horror. These did it. I was awe-struck.
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