Letter to the Editor

The fall issue of Belle Armoire Jew­elry was on the stands at Bor­ders Sat­ur­day after­noon.? When I picked it up, the first thing I turned to was the Let­ters to the Edi­tor sec­tion.? It con­tained four very brief, nothing-​but-​praise entries — not even a breath about the neg­a­tive responses to the Carter Seibels fea­ture in the last issue.? I know that they received crit­i­cal feed­back from sev­eral peo­ple, includ­ing me, but you would never guess from the let­ters, nor from the Editor’s Com­ments, nor any indi­ca­tion of any response any­where from the table of contents.

At first I was a lit­tle per­turbed, but then I remem­bered that this IS a Stamp­ing­ton mag­a­zine.? In all the years I’ve read their var­i­ous mag­a­zines off and on, I have rarely if ever seen a neg­a­tive com­ment.? That seems to be in keep­ing with their whole edi­to­r­ial phi­los­o­phy — much of their pub­lished art­work has a def­i­nite same­ness about it; rarely do you see any­thing out­side very nar­row bound­aries in there.? (There’s a rea­son I don’t buy many of their mag­a­zines any more — in truth they get bor­ing quickly.)

Since they chose not to pub­lish my com­ments, at the risk of being repet­i­tive I’ll post them here:

Dear Edi­tor,

My delight in see­ing a lam­p­work artist fea­tured in the Sum­mer 08 issue of Belle Armoire Jew­elry rapidly turned to dis­may as I read Rice Freeman-Zachary’s arti­cle on Carter Seibels, for two rea­sons.? Appar­ently nei­ther Ms. Seibels nor Ms. Freeman-​Zachary fully under­stands the use of presses in mak­ing lam­p­worked beads.? Pressed beads are indeed hand-​crafted, formed one at a time at the torch, unlike fur­nace glass beads which are mass-​produced using molds and then cut into indi­vid­ual beads.? In the hands of a lam­p­worker, the press is sim­ply another tool in their arse­nal, allow­ing cre­ation of forms that would be extremely dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, with­out their use.? Let us not for­get that “hand-​formed” beads are actu­ally shaped with tools, not actual hands, as well!? The qual­ity of the result­ing bead depends on the skill and vision of the artist, regard­less of what tools are used to form the bead — whether pressed or hand-​formed, a bead can be exquis­ite or merely ordinary.

Far more dis­turb­ing, though, was the para­graph where Ms. Seibels equates “middle-​aged” bead­mak­ers with tra­di­tional work, and younger artists with exper­i­men­tal and thus more cre­ative work.? Such gen­er­al­iza­tions are dan­ger­ous! To many peo­ple, “tra­di­tional” implies bor­ing, stodgy, and ordi­nary — words which no one wants applied to them­self or their work. Had this ageist remark referred to dif­fer­ences in race or gen­der, I hope it would never have seen the light of print.? As a “middle-​aged” artist myself, I hope that the edi­to­r­ial staff, Ms. Freeman-​Zachary, and Ms. Seibels will con­sider their words far more care­fully in the future.? Fur­ther­more, I sug­gest that you take note of such cre­ative lam­p­work­ing vision­ar­ies such as Andrea Guarino-​Slemmons and Lydia Muell, both decid­edly older than Ms. Seibels her­self and both of whom have aban­doned eBay for other, more artist-​friendly, sales venues.

Sincerely,