Neon Wonderland

So, yeah.  Turns out art school isn't the most productive environment for me when it comes to blogging.  Besides being busy and not really being interested in going to do touristy things in my home country, I'm writing on the other side of the page - that is, academia.  It's objectively less writing than in my MA, but it's still a little like eating your vegetables before desert.  It'll ruin your appetite. 

But it's Sunday, and Sunday was always my blogging day in that other life.  I'm (at the time of writing) also just a few short weeks away from my very own Vegas weekend, courtesy of the Evil One, who will be in the States on home leave.  I'll definitely be writing about that, a self-respecting blogger just CAN'T have a Vegas Weekend (even a Mormon one) and not write about it.  You may well be wondering what that has to do with this, but see, for my thesis exhibition, I'm planning to create an exhibition focused on the experience of Korea, neon side streets in places like Jongno 3-ga and Apgujeong, and my mentor, genius that she is, suggested I take a neon class as research.  Going to Vegas also qualifies as "research," but I digress...

So for five weeks last winter I ditched church* to go to Foci Center for Glass Arts.  Here's something that nobody ever tells you: bending glass is fucking hard.  Neon signs are the definition of ubiquitous: they have been everywhere, all throughout my life.  Leading up to the class, I thought with disdain about how I was NOT going to make a word, because that was boring.  More to the point, I was not going to make a word, because that is a lot of damn work, and bending glass didn't come natural to me.  To give you an illustration of this, the most important skill in neon is what's called a double back, a 180-turn in the glass that sends the tube back in the direction it came from.  After 17 hours of class time, I still can't reliably make a double back.  I ALSO can't weld two pieces of glass together, which is pretty important, because the tubes are only 4-5 feet long, and once you start bending it, that doesn't go very far.  There are ways around both of those skills, and thank fuck for that, but I struggled with this media in ways I previously wasn't aware it was possible for me to struggle.

My biggest regret as a student in this class was that I should have spend more time practicing outside of class.  Robert, our instructor, told us to on the first day, pretty much as soon as we got started, to go in and practice on our own - studio time was super cheap, after all, and there is something relaxing about being there on your own with no one to see you fuck up or burn yourself - but with everything else going on, I didn't get the chance to actually do so until the 11th hour, when I was panicking that I might not actually get a working piece finished.  I made a lot of progress in those two hours, and if they'd happened much earlier on...well, who knows?

Well, a few weeks ago, I was curious about the upcoming stained glass classes.  I am under strict orders from my mentor to rein myself in and not go wandering off after new techniques for a while, but I got a membership when I signed up for Neon I - it gives you 10% off classes, which is a significant chunk when it's a 5 week neon class - and there are only a few months left to use it.  For good measure, I looked to see if they were offering Neon II...but instead, they had a technical class on how to wire our work, which included instruction on making a support structure.  By the time the class rolled around, I was not feeling it.  It was 90 degrees fahrenheit on October-fucking-fourth, and my feet were exhausted from a week with either too much printing or too much papermaking (...or both?  Both sounds good).  In my past life, when money was disposable, I might have just ate the cost and stayed in my studio working on my other things, but in THIS life, fifty bucks is both a lot of money and not nearly enough, so I went.  And it was really good that I did, because now I feel like I can actually finish my project.  I don't have the words to express my appreciation for one of MCAD's old guard sitting down and talking me through how I would display my sign, but a.) it was six months ago, and b.) there is just something completely different about having the different bits and things you will need right in front of you, rather than on a screen.

*In my defense, I would have chosen a class that didn't meet on Sundays, but at the time there weren't any.