July in the studio: Blue eyes, yellow petals and something for myself

I never think I do enough.

There are always too many ideas and never enough hours in the day. Yet looking back through the July photos on my phone, even I had to admit that quite a lot had happened.

There were sunflowers, yachts, red petals, rainbow colour bars, a dog with astonishing blue eyes and an artwork setting off across the Atlantic.

There were also several things I’m still not allowed to show you :)

So this was July. Well, the visible part of it.

July in nine pictures

How can glass look so alive?

Everyone talks about Blue’s eyes.

They are strikingly blue, beautifully made and full of intelligence. Dog intelligence, of course. The sort that watches everything and somehow knows when food is involved :)

Yet what surprised me was not just the eyes, which I knew had to be perfect.
It was the life in the whole dog.

Blue isn't sitting passively inside an artwork. He is staring upwards, just as a real dog does when watching his family and waiting to see what happens next.

I think the angle of his head, his markings and that attentive expression really make you feel he is looking back at you.

A lifelike dog created entirely in Hard Edge fused glass might even be a world first - I've certainly never seen another.

And of course there is not a single stroke of paint.

Who knew glass could do that?

A yacht, a river and a honeymoon in Italy

Beaulieu River completed, including one very particular little sailing boat

Beaulieu River and Vernazza both reached important moments during July.

Beaulieu River was created for a couple who spend time at their local yacht club.

The boat isn't a generic yacht added to make the river look pretty.

It's their own Scow.

More precisely, it is a Beaulieu River Scow, a traditional small sailing dinghy particular to that part of the south coast. The local version developed from the Lymington and West Solent Scow and has its own class within the Beaulieu River Sailing Club.

I now know considerably more about Scows than I did when the commission began.

That’s part of creating personal art.

Details which might mean little to anybody else can mean everything to the people who commissioned it.

This is their river, their sailing world and their very particular boat. I hope it will inspire a few conversations when their yachting friends see it.

Vernazza contains a different personal history.

It was commissioned as a fifteenth wedding anniversary gift, inspired by the couple’s honeymoon in this glorious Italian coastal village.

Vernazza has everything you could want from Italy. Colourful houses cling to the hillside, little boats gather around the harbour and every view seems designed to become a picture postcard.

The whole coastal area of Cinque Terre can comfortably hold its own against the Amalfi Coast. After spending so long recreating it in glass, I had become very fond of it.

After completion, I looked after the work for some months while the collector was moving home. Then July brought the moment when it was ready to leave for the USA.

That is the strange bargain at the heart of commissioned art.

You spend months bringing an artwork to life, grow rather attached to it and then, just as it looks completely at home, somebody arrives to take it away in a very large box!

And now ... what I can't show you!

Cutting sunflowers, with every petal made in a different shade of yellow

Some of July must remain hidden.

I completed a gorgeous new botanical design and will soon begin turning it into glass.

Another secret commission is almost finished, but I don't think I can reveal that one until October.

Secret commissions are exciting.

They are also extremely inconvenient when you are trying to write a monthly roundup :)

For now, all I can show you is fragments, colours and mysterious shapes. The complete stories will have to wait.

How commissions took over

For the past two years I have worked almost continuously on commissions.

It happened naturally.

Previously, I divided my time between commissions and original artworks created from my own ideas.

Then more people began approaching me with a familiar question:

Could you make something like this for me?

One request led to another.

People brought me their animals, favourite places, anniversaries, gardens and memories.

Gradually, commissioned work stopped being one part of what I did and became almost everything I did.

I love entering those stories and discovering how they might become glass.

Yet I had also begun to miss making something simply because an idea had entered my head and refused to leave.

A brief escape to Nice

Nice and other towns along the Côte d’Azur through my eyes: strong geometry, Mediterranean plants and those glorious sun-drenched colours

The summer holiday season brought a slight easing in the schedule before the Christmas work begins.

So naturally, I decided to make more art.

This time, however, the artwork is for me.

It is inspired by Nice and the Côte d’Azur, an area I love. There is something about its colour, light and heat that stays with you long after you return home.

Most people come back from Nice with photographs, a bottle of something and a determination to visit again.

I came back with another artwork in my head.

A commission begins with somebody else’s story. Nice begins with mine.

There is no client waiting to approve the design or request particular colours. I can follow the idea wherever it leads and discover the artwork by making it.

That feels like a small holiday in itself!

The artworks that stayed

Most of the artworks I have created during the past two years now live in other people’s homes. Some are in Britain. Many are thousands of miles away.

Fortunately, a few favourites remain with me.

Toucans, Abundance, Palm House, Stairs and Spectrum brighten my own home. I still enjoy seeing them and remain immensely proud of them.

Artists like showing people what they have made. Keeping an artist’s favourite work entirely private is apparently not an available option.

That is why I have created My Personal Gallery.

It brings together the artworks I have chosen to keep and allows me to share their stories without presenting them as a shop.

Commissioned art means spending weeks with an artwork, growing to love it and then sending it away forever. The collector receives something uniquely theirs. I have the pleasure of creating it and the photographs to remember it by.

That is exactly how commissioning should work.

Even so, it is rather lovely knowing that not every artwork I love has disappeared into the back of a delivery van.

Back to the workbench

Soon the studio will fill again with other people’s stories.

There are botanical shapes waiting to be cut, secrets waiting to be revealed and Christmas commissions appearing on the horizon.

For the moment, I am enjoying a little time in Nice.

Not literally, sadly.

I am at my workbench in Skelmersdale, surrounded by pieces of glass.

But artists have their own ways of travelling.