Tiffany Glass Study Break
On Friday Joelle and I went to see the Tiffany glass exhibit at the Muscarelle Museum. It was a small exhibit, filled with examples of Tiffany's lamps, vases, and a stained glass window. We thought it would be a good study break from the bar, but I am not sure it actually was a break.
The exhibit showed the result of taking a lot of small, carefully selected pieces, and soldering them together to make something amazingly complex and organic. Each completed work was a result of careful planning and a lot of hard work. Each was the result of a lot of little pieces that didn't mean much individually, but when put together carefully, they made something overwhelmingly complicated and beautiful. Each lamp looked like something no person could make, but rather something that had to grow naturally.
On one lamp, there was a complicated wisteria design, for which Tiffany had become famous. Each lamp had carefully selected and soldered petals, hundreds of them. For one exhibit of several of the lamps, the Tiffany Glass factory had to work round the clock to fill the order for the exhibit. Three women were assigned to work on each lamp, selecting the pieces, and placing them on a planning easel where the welders would assemble the completed lamp. After 5 days of work a cleaning lady bumped one of the easels, sending hundreds of tiny pieces, representing hours of painstaking work selecting and placing, scattered to the floor. The factor foreman said that it was so overwhelming, there wasn't a word of complaint or regret. The team just rushed to the easel and began working to reassemble what was lost from the pieces on the floor.
It seems like maybe the Tiffany glass exhibit wasn't a bar break after all. Instead it taught us something about how to do the work and not flip out about it, to pluck the small pieces from the piles of books in front of us and create something that seems overwhelmingly complicated and beyond our ability to create. Just follow the plan, put the pieces together, and the whole thing will come together in the end. And if you suffer a set back, don't spend time complaining or regretting the error, just get back to putting the pieces together.
The exhibit showed the result of taking a lot of small, carefully selected pieces, and soldering them together to make something amazingly complex and organic. Each completed work was a result of careful planning and a lot of hard work. Each was the result of a lot of little pieces that didn't mean much individually, but when put together carefully, they made something overwhelmingly complicated and beautiful. Each lamp looked like something no person could make, but rather something that had to grow naturally.
On one lamp, there was a complicated wisteria design, for which Tiffany had become famous. Each lamp had carefully selected and soldered petals, hundreds of them. For one exhibit of several of the lamps, the Tiffany Glass factory had to work round the clock to fill the order for the exhibit. Three women were assigned to work on each lamp, selecting the pieces, and placing them on a planning easel where the welders would assemble the completed lamp. After 5 days of work a cleaning lady bumped one of the easels, sending hundreds of tiny pieces, representing hours of painstaking work selecting and placing, scattered to the floor. The factor foreman said that it was so overwhelming, there wasn't a word of complaint or regret. The team just rushed to the easel and began working to reassemble what was lost from the pieces on the floor.
It seems like maybe the Tiffany glass exhibit wasn't a bar break after all. Instead it taught us something about how to do the work and not flip out about it, to pluck the small pieces from the piles of books in front of us and create something that seems overwhelmingly complicated and beyond our ability to create. Just follow the plan, put the pieces together, and the whole thing will come together in the end. And if you suffer a set back, don't spend time complaining or regretting the error, just get back to putting the pieces together.