Well, first of all, after last night the drawings and further plans for the next days work had to begin at the Matador a bit up the road on Pacific (a really great Mexican restaurant). While we’re mentioning restaurants, don’t miss the Indochine (also on Pacific) if you’re ever in Tacoma. The area around the Museum that we’ve checked out is really enjoyable and any visitor wouldn’t be disappointed. We began day 2 in the hot shop picking up where we left off the day before making the last of the blown glass bases for the sculptural domes we completed yesterday with the TMoG team. While I’m working on this specific piece there are actually three distinct parts which create the whole…all depending on specific porportionate ratios and formal relationships between these shapes that must be precisely integrated. However, in making these multiple parts I am hoping they all will cultivate several variations upon a common theme. Working with strict attention to scale, porportion and dimension is escpecially demanding and this team is certainly up to the task. Every component being made over the past couple of days shows exceptional potential to be utilized within my work and I am grateful. After finishing the base forms we began to concentrate on the objects to be contained within the sculpture. We started a series of hot-sculpted tree forms to be enclosed within the piece and Ben Cobb did an excellent job of figuring out the shape and the processes involved in bringing it to resolution…a convincing interpretation of the real thing. To do so takes a tremendous attention to detail and I appreciated everyone’s efforts in bringing resolution to our first piece. Tomorrow I look forward to our approach in creating hot-sculpted bees (which i will later engrave) to be included as sculptural components to our next finished piece.

We celebrated another successful day in the studio (again) at the Swiss where we shared a pitcher of beer with Alex Stisser (who, by the way, happens to be from Galva, IL…near my hometown in Wyoming, IL). After a few games of shuffleboard we went and had sushi the Gari Of Sushi (at 1209 S. 38th St.) - highly recommended. If you like blowing glass, drinking brew and eating great food then you can’t do better then Tacoma.