Chandelier...Further In

Chandelier...Further In

For those of you who are just tuning in this is (in part) about my first large commission which is a 3 foot diameter octagonal chandelier.

Some of my first errors were not discovered until well into the project. I didn't know that they were my first errors at the time. In hindsight earlier realizations would have been better, but regardless they would still have been errors made and missed at the beginning.

Almost every time I realize one of these mistakes (at the moment this is still an ongoing project I am struggling with) it has thrown me into a depression. Generally I am pretty low-key and fairly calm. On this project I have thrown my hands up and cursed and had to walk away, (- and go for a looong walk-) countless times. There has been the odd mistake that has galvanized my will to solve the problem and move forward, but mostly it has gone the other way.

That has been one of the harder things for me. I try to be pretty resilient. I try to be pretty optimistic. On this project my ability to be those things has been almost non-existent. And that is important to recognize for anyone who suffers these cycles. Why has this been so difficult for me? Well, let's see...there are all those factors that I outlined briefly that life has thrown at me...all that change. That is likely a big part of it. All those things take a toll. Beyond that though, this is the challenge I've always avoided. This is me facing the thing I thought I couldn't do. And at every turn so far, it has proved me right. That is why it has been so important that I keep coming back.

Truth is, though, that courage to come back takes way more time to work up than I'd like. 

I fill those gaps with work, and with life.   Sometimes there are no gaps to be filled, there is just work, or life...

There is the original slump of depression, and the best way to shake that is to get busy. If I were more experienced, or perhaps just better I might try to shake it by getting busy with the chandelier, but I am just not that resilient.

So there are big gaps of time between each and every stage of the project. Those gaps all have reasons that sound like excuses – and they sound like excuses because I guess they are. The biggest reason that the gaps are there is because it takes me time to work up the courage to try again, and to solve the problem that I have created. 

Unfortunately, by doing that I am creating new problems. The gaps mean this project has been worked in bits and pieces, in fits and starts (literally.) Being away from the project, I lose sight of it. I forget little details. There is no flow.

Often, I forget a crucial detail that I had figured out last time I worked on it – or fix an error only to re-create it in a new and exciting way because I remember that I fixed it...and then neglect to take it into consideration for the next step.

And then there are the tangible problems to wrestle through...

There was another element that I thought would be easy that turned out to be nearly impossible – dependent on the timing. The light source. Yes, this is a chandelier and I knew it would be important (I'm not quite that daft.) What I didn't realize was that finding just the right light source to fit was going to be quite so hard. I did know what I needed and what I wanted. I didn't realize it would be so close to being unavailable or non-existent in the trends of lighting design. Particularly given the size.

When I began the project I had seen several fixtures that would have worked. By the time I got into the project none of them were on the market anymore.

The piece is a 3 foot diameter...if the light fixture is made for a normal household lighting fixture the light will all be centred around a fairly small area in the centre. This piece also needs enough light to penetrate the art glass and still give the desired amount of light, so it needs to be multiple bulbs...as close to 8 as possible since it is an octagon. Strangely this is not easy to find without paying for someone else's design or paying for an electrician to not only build the thing but then get it certified....oops.

If I ever do a lighting project again – and for all its difficulites I am intrigued to do something (smaller perhaps!) - I would buy the light fixture first and design around it. I am sure that anyone with sense would do just that...but as this is my first rodeo, it wasn't something I had thought would present quite as much of a problem as it has.

So far I have solved the fixture problem, but the at time of writing, the attachment problem is still looming before me. I'm sure there will be a lot of learning opportunities involved in that as well. I have some ideas now, but whether they will be realistic ones is entirely another matter.