 As I’ve shared before, one of the most valuable bits of professional advice EVER came me from the marvelous Janice Hosegood, then manager of the much-missed Electrum Gallery. Reviewing my portfolio, Janice’s only criticism was that my prices were too low. Since that was the opposite of what I’d heard from every gallerist ever I was a little startled. Janice patiently explained that my work would never appeal to everyone, that I needed to price it so that I could afford for it to await the right person, and—unlike a pear in a fruit bowl—good work wouldn’t go bad from simply biding its time. So Janice: this little press clipping is for you! Kamakura is a pair of wooden brooches based on statues from Japan’s Kamakura period; they’re stained dark, like wood exposed to smoke over centuries, and have eyes made from watch crystals, reverse-painted and gilded and inset into the wood from behind. I carved these pieces in 2005. Over the next decade, they alternated appearing in 5 different gallery shows with hibernating in a shoebox under my bed. Sometime after I moved to Penland in 2020, I put them up on the wall of my gallery space. I dithered about displaying older work, but I liked looking at them; they still felt like my work, and I was still satisfied with them, even if no one else appeared to be. Then during the weekend of Penland’s 2022 auction, the brooches were purchased by Andrea Specht, executive director of the American Craft Council. This month (May 2024) she nominated them as her pick in American Craft magazine’s “Finds” section, writing, “From the moment I saw this pair of Kamakura brooches, I couldn’t think about much else until I returned the following day to buy them…I wear only one at a time, and every time I do, I feel like I have an unspecified superpower.” Made in 2005, sold in 2022, superpowered in 2024. We live in a time that emphasizes dopamine loops, just-add-water success, and lists of “Ten People Who’ve Changed the World Before Turning Ten,” but without taking anything away from those ingenues, I’d like to suggest that slow success can be satisfying too.
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