2. Hidden Collections

Okay, so the two of you became interested in enameling a while ago.

Do you know when and did you do it together? How did you find this medium?

It started with me in 1981.

I was living in Norman, Oklahoma.

I was interested in making art, and someone suggested I take an enabling workshop that was being offered by the local art center in Norman, Oklahoma.

And so I enrolled in this course, which was supposed to be 12 weeks.

but the instructor only showed up for three of them.

But it made me fall in love with the transformative power that comes with sprinkling glass powder onto a metal surface, heating it up, and what resulted was just magical.

and the colors were amazing, and I want to learn more, but unfortunately, he never came back, and then I moved to Long Beach, California, so I never pursued it.

So that took me onto the medium, and I understood what enabling was.

Fast forward to 1991, 92, We had been together and we started going to flea markets and consignment shops.

And lo and behold, we saw some enamels.

And I gasped and I said, what? I said, enamels? He said, what are those? So I explained, it's like I wanted to do this and I never got a chance to do it.

And Hal held one plate, which was, I think, by Anne-Marie Davidson.

And we were just so mesmerized by it.

And we had been collecting Czechoslovakian glass and Italian glass, and this was not glass and it was not ceramic.

It was a unique medium and we were fascinated by it.

And lo and behold, we kept finding things week after week and we would buy them because they were very inexpensive.

Hal, did you know anything about the medium before you and Bernard hooked up?

Really nothing, no.

And he mentioned that we were looking for checks of locking glass, and we just happened on the enamels, and Bernard did know about the process of enameling, and so I learned through him really about how enameling is done.

and was fascinated.

And we started acquiring things.

We started buying things at flea markets and consignment shops at very reasonable prices at the time.

And some of the work was what we later determined was production wear that were designed by anomalous designers, but really produced for mass distribution.