Pennsylvania’s Genevieve Williamson starts this week of giving thanks with a sweet little fiber-y bead tutorial.
As Genevieve says, “I’ve had some polymer artists extend themselves and share their knowledge and present me with great opportunities. Kindness should overflow, shouldn’t it? So it seems appropriate that I make my first small attempt to give back with a tutorial at the beginning of America’s week of Thanksgiving.”
The kindness flowed back from Germany in the watery colors of Kathrin Neumaier’s fish bead necklace. Kathrin acknowledges that her idea for carving the fish beads came after seeing the rough hewn look of Genevieve’s carved beads and rings. The link was sent in by Margit Böhmer.
There is much caring and sharing in this community and yesterday was an example of your goodness. See Monday’s post if you missed all the ruckus and the happy ending. As Angela Mabray said, “Now that that’s settled, let’s all get back to work.”
Ronna ,
It has been a privilege (and fun) to work with Genevieve (even though we’ve only met in cyberspace and over the phone). If I’ve been able to mentor, then I’m all the more thrilled. Sometimes when two artists have similar aesthetics, others can wonder if one is “borrowing” ideas and techniques from the other. I know that Genevieve and I often end up doing very similar things that we’ve each arrived at on our own — I’ll see pictures of work she has done that are very similar to work I have in the studio, and no doubt she has the same experience occasionally with my work. The reason I’m mentioning it is many of us know that feeling of seeing a picture of a piece of jewelry or work of art online, and it’s eerily like original work we’re doing, and then we get this very uncomfortable feeling of worrying that someone will think we have copied, when instead we’ve been experimenting, fixing, tweaking, experimenting more to get to what was in our head. Yes, there is plenty of copying out there — sometimes it’s copying and selling without acknowledging, and that’s a no-no, but often it is done in homage to our work, our books, or DVDs and it is WAY WAY FUN to see what people are doing with our techniques and guidance. Often original work is being created that is similar in aesthetic and technique to others, and that’s all part of it. The polymer community seems to be pretty unique in our sharing and mentoring. It’s a blessing.
genevieve ,
Amen Ronna.
As an example of how ideas roll along and change and grow with each artist I clicked to Karin’s link before reading Cynthia’s post this morning (I want all the images first and then I go back and read) so I didn’t realize that Karin’s beads were carved after seeing my carving. I’m setting myself up to look like a real dip now but I sat there and thought “wow what did she do? they really look like fish scales”. (Duh.) It was only after I came back here and actually read Cynthia’s post all the way through that I realized that Karin had carved but with a completely different end result. THAT is really exciting!
And thank you Cynthia – not sure where we’d be without PCD!