F R O M T H E E D I T O R
10 000
Opportunities
t h e r e ’ s a m a g n e t o n a b u l -
letin board in my house whose
message haunts me from time
to time. It’s a quote from writer
Annie Dillard: “How we spend
our days is how we spend our
lives.” It reminds me that the
future is now. Life is short, and
there’s no time like the present
to respond to the creative
muse within.
I felt the same conviction
about an exhortation I once saw
on an artist’s T-shirt: “Go to your
studio and make something!”
Yet modern life offers a
million distractions, a million
ways to kill time or at least
stand by idly while it expires.
Ever watched any of Bravo
T V ’s
Real Housewives
series?
Whiled away a few hours play-
ing solitaire on your laptop?
Puttered around on Facebook
and looked up to discover that
an afternoon is gone? Then you
know what I mean. An hour of
semi-conscious “downtime”
can become a weekend, a habit,
a lost opportunity.
When you talk to working
artists, you learn that the artful
life is not some dreamy possibil-
ity in a gauzy future but a disci-
plined commitment of time
today. I once asked a ceramics
instructor how he got so good
at his work. “Tonnage” was
the terse reply. Educational
psychologists say it takes 10,000
hours of practice to develop a
solid skill. So if we want to
get good at something, Annie
Dillard might say, we’d best
get cracking.
For this issue we connected
with a number of glass artists
who’ve invested huge blocks
of time in their art forms. They
had to. You don’t become a
glass artist on a whim. You
don’t do it part-time in the
basement. Developing a facility
with glass takes a significant
commitment, in both time and
money. As Seattle-based artist
Mark Zirpel says, “In glass, the
relationship between technique
and content looms large. One
could spend a lifetime working
on technical proficiency and
never get to the art.”
There are, we know, rewards
for investing those 10,000 hours
in building a skill. As the soci-
ologist Richard Sennett has
pointed out, making time for
making pays big benefits: the
satisfaction of self-expression,
the self-respect that comes with
mastery, and a sense of tangible
connection to the world.
These are intrinsic rewards,
of course. Generally speaking,
they won’t land you in
People
magazine or on the Forbes 400
list. But it may be that the
intrinsic rewards are the ones
that ultimately matter.
I can’t prove that people
who’ve chosen these rewards
are happier. But I do know that
glass artist Judith Schaechter
signs e-mails to complete strang-
ers “Love, Judith.” And when
you ask Zirpel what he is proud-
est of, he doesn’t cite exhibi-
tions or awards, but that he has
chosen the road less taken,
the life of the imagination.
Many of the artists we talk to
come across as more genuine
and self-aware than your aver-
age human being - and that in-
cludes the one who called back
to make sure he sounded grate-
ful, not mercenary, when he
listed the big names he’s been
lucky to work with.
Everyone gets 24 hours each
day. Some do more with them
than others. Enjoy this issue,
and let us know what you think.
Monica Moses
Dale Chihuly
Matthew Szosz
Dante Marioni
Judith Schaechter
Joyce Scott
Einar &Jamex de la Torre
April Surgent
Mark Zirpel
Richard Marquis
Debora Moore
David Willis
08
american craft fcb/m arn
Glass block: igmata.com / Moses photos: Jill Greer (portrait), Mark LaFavor (block)
