Dear <<First Name>>,

The last couple months have been a period of intense productivity and creativity in the studio. There are a few reasons for this— a new website, a commission that inspired me and an Open Studio event we'll be holding on Friday, October 16 from 4-7PM. Let's give each their due below…

Open Studio Event Friday, October 16, 4-7 PM

If you're near enough to visit, we're opening the studio to the public for one day only, Friday, October 16, 4-7 PM. The studio address is 407 Middle Road, Hudson, NY 12534. There will be examples of every current design of Sculptural Firebowls, torches, a bunch of new sculpture, mosaics and other work available to see and purchase. I plan to make this a twice annual event, once in spring and once in fall. It's impractical on many levels to have the studio open as a retail space on a daily basis, so a twice yearly event seems like the best way to show new work and give studio tours in a way I can manage.

I've always found that show deadlines are the best inspiration for new work, and I've been creating all kinds of new work to show at the open studio. I've even created three new firebowl designs and have a couple more I'm still working on (see below).

Check out the new website!

Both my main website and the store have a whole new design as of the last month to bring them up to date and make them mobile responsive (which Google now requires of all sites before they can be included in search results). The design is by Nan Tepper Design, and she did an amazing job!

There are four ways the process of rebuilding the site inspired me to make new work.

The first is obvious— because I haven't been posting new work to the site, I really didn't have a way to show new work. Now that this project is done, I'll be posting new work frequently and adding all of the commissions and artwork done in the last 2-3 years that never went online. It's exciting to have a new venue to show what I'm working on, and Wordpress makes it much, much easier to format the work so it looks its best. Like a tree that falls in the forest when no one's around, making new art isn't as much fun when you don't have anywhere to display it.

The second way the project inspired me was by forcing me to look again at every single piece of art I've done in fairly extensive detail. Redoing the photos, searching for older work, re-writing and editing the text that accompanies each piece really reconnected me with my history. It's one thing to casually browse through your portfolio, but entirely different when you have to pay attention to each piece long enough to see that all the details are correct— I had a chance to look at how I've grown as an artist, notice themes that have repeated and been extended over the years, think about why I chose each material, idea, style, etc. This forced retrospective was incredibly useful because it gave me the opportunity to become conscious of choices I may have made subliminally at the time, and to examine more objectively the things I do by habit or instinct.

The third level of inspiration came about because we were designing the site with an eye towards where I want my art to go in the future— It was important to prioritize which work would get the greatest exposure, which work I wanted to continue forward and what kind of work I want to be known for. For the last ten years, the firebowls have been the greatest focus because they were the work that really paid the bills. But going forward, I'd like to focus on one of a kind fine art again and so it was important to give that work equal exposure. Just as I had to examine where I've been, I needed to give equal thought to where I want to go next and this has spawned a lot of new ideas.

The fourth level of inspiration was sort of unexpected and odd. It's easy, and maybe even trite to say that a website is the "face you present to the world at large" or something like that… but I discovered that it goes a little deeper than that for me personally. I've always been very deliberate about who I am, what I do and how I do it— from early childhood I had a very uncompromising stance on the kind of person I intended to be. I made choices, stood by them, and put all my effort into reinforcing them. So, in a certain sense, I invented myself quite deliberately.

But the thing is— I don't lie and I suck at making things up. I'm terrible at any kind of fiction and I've always avoided it because it's not sustainable for me. My solution as a writer was to try to live an adventurous life and write it down and my solution as an artist was similar, to make what I see as best I knew how. The upshot of all this is that, for me, the face I present to the world and the person you would meet in person have to bear a 1:1 relationship. They need to be the same, because if I were to fabulate who I am on the site, I'd never be able to carry off an impression of that person later. This is, like I said, kind of weird, because I don't think most people act so deliberately to create themselves but what it came down to in this context was really looking at the artist I am and the artist I want to be and creating an accurate portrayal of that person that I could easily live up to. Because if you don't live up to your own image of yourself then there's something wrong and you need to go back to the sketchbook.

Some highlights of the new website—

• I added 73 mixed media works made from 1995-2001 which were previously not on the site. I'll be adding a few more works as I get time to write them up.
• The blog details ideas and process going all the way back to 2003. But it now loads on a single page with a featured image and caption for each post so that you can easily browse and read just the posts which interest you.
• There is a new gallery of custom firebowls which I'll be adding to and bringing up to date. The best ones are yet to come.
• I was pretty amazed at how much press I've had over the years. For instance, look at the page listing books which I've contributed to or been mention in— I've been in 18 books! You can see other media in the menu under press.
• The Help/FAQ page has a a great new look which makes it much easier to find the answers to common questions.

New work inspired by a recent commission

If you scroll to the bottom of this email, there's a photo of the Fudo Myoo Light Fixture I recently completed as a commission. There's also a link to a case study I wrote up about why and how it was such a successful collaboration between myself and the client. After working on that piece, I started doing more new lighting fixtures that will be available at the Open Studio and soon on the store. Here are two of them:

In addition to new works, I've also done a ton of work on the house and yard to prepare for the Open Studio event. I've installed pipe organ pipes, tubas and antique radios into the studio barn; cleared a bay of the barn to house Radio Ancestrale, my museum installation from 2000 (which I'll be getting out of storage on a trip next week to see Jerry Lee Lewis play in Beaumont, TX); I've uncovered the original pine floors in the house from when it was built 150 years ago. Like I say, deadlines are a great way to get things done that would otherwise take longer.

The last bit of exciting news is that Old Glory was featured on the PBS show, AHA! A House for Arts on WMHT, Albany. You can watch the entire episode online here.

Thank you,
John T. Unger