Most people use their About Me page as a way to guide you to their website. I've given up trying to wrangle my website into submission, and will use this About Me page to let you into my head and heart, hoping this will resonate with you. For those who find my wild romp of an Artist's Statement just annoying, please practice all those manners your mother tried to teach you and slide quietly elsewhere...

Before we get to that, I'm often asked if I have more beads for sale than in my auctions. The short answer is no, the longer answer is that I'm happy to correspond with people about what they need, or have envisioned, or beads they remember from my past auctions. Often I can do a special order for you, that will be sold as a Buy-It-Now auction here on eBay at a predetermined time.

Writing an "Artist's Statement" is a task I've shied away from. It's way too scary. First of all, I'd have to proclaim myself an artist, and then I'd have to percolate some profound statement up to the surface and proclaim that too. Forget it. We'll go instead with:

"Why I Do It"

It's The Process. I love the process. The beads are a happy bi-product of the process.

How do I know? My personal history with crafts. (Before I divulge that, I just want you to know that I have had a stable marriage for 30 years, and several very long-term friendships.) My personal history with crafts will be an archeologist's dream come true. The guy in the pith helmet 2000 years from now will think he's hit gold when he uncovers my studio. Sadly, he'll assume that what he's discovered is the accumulated tools of a whole group of guilds, rather than the obsessive collection of one woman.

A woman, who with narrow vision gropes from one process to the next, gaily "tooling up" for the new interest with the same abandon that the promiscuous apply to romance. First exposure to a new craft as exciting as a first kiss. Pouring over books and web articles as thrilling as first dates. Locating obscure tools and supplies as seductive as a trip to the diamond counter. You all know, though, that this kind of infatuation is not to be trusted. Inevitably, the breakup comes, when my attention is pulled to a newer, more elegant distraction. The breakup leaves me feeling guilty, foolish and poorer, but stubbornly determined to push on with the new love, this one being "the real thing".

I am often admired as "so artistic", but in private, quiet moments, I see myself as more of a recluse, hoarding tools and skills, piling boxes of raw materials to the ceiling like bundles of yellowed newspapers. Pitiable.

But back to the beads. What do I find so seductive?

The tools. The glass. The torch. The breathy company of my oxygen concentrator. The drunken swagger with which I order hundreds of dollars worth of rod, and the pleasure with which I make my glass racks bulge. My glass racks, arranged according to the spectrum, like ROY G BIV was my own invention. The casual ease with which I light up my torch and handle molten glass, teasing it into balance around a mandrel, letting temperature, surface tension and gravity duke it out. Admiring a plain base bead, with a perfectly parallel footprint and round equator. Sheer harmony. Pulling a stringer to astonishing lengths, trusting the narrow strands not to cut me as I break it into short pieces in my bare fingers. Finding the sweet spot just outside the flame to coax the stringer into a design on its bead, melting it in just so. Not too high, not too flat. Wrapping a finished design with a thick coat of clear, watching the design leap into 3-D filling its magnifying lens. Trusting my thousand degree kiln not to scorch me, depending on the truce we've signed, "In and out in one second and you're safe." Mmm, the process.

And the beads. They are everywhere, like pocket change with no bowl to call home. All the windowsills, the ledges, the end tables, the lip of the sink, the tub, the shower, my pockets, my purses, my car, my desk, until the roundup is declared and with amazement I see what a small handful they are. But when they are strung, constructed, suddenly they are huge in my mind. The piece fills the sky, blocks out the sun, each little orb the center of a solar system of its own. Relative dimensions loose all perspective. I have no idea if a design is simplistic or profound, childish or elegant. It simply is what it is. I am in love.

Really, to be fair to my fantasy archeologist, I should pull out my Dremel tool and create my own Rosetta Stone to leave an explanation, but with horror I realize that brings me terrifyingly close to learning to carve. Hmm, tempting….

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