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It just so happened that I was due to take a
trip to see Chris Dawson around this
time. He was living in Ocean Beach California but was visiting
Corvallis Oregon where he was raised which was not too far from
me. Chris Dawson grabbed a piece of my new Dichroic glass (the
coating now known as Starship/Tical) like
a kid in a candy store, amazed at the thickness of the
coating and the glass. He quickly proceded to make a galaxy
marble and the finished results changed the history of BoroDichroic.
The
Dichro we had created was beautiful and geometric and a thousand
times more jewel-like than any other
Dichroic company out there. It was around this time I also discovered
that one could apply the flame right on to the metal coating
and that GTT torches and Herbert Arnolds are especially good
for Dichro. I was amazed at how much the Dichroic added to the
finished look of my work and how it was just
as easy to use as fuming and color techniques. A whole
new age of flameworking was developing for me as I created new
methods and styles to work with my new favorite medium- Dichroic.
After numerous
dollars worth of coating runs, lifetimes of hours on the torch,
and many conversations, Dan Coursen approached me with a proposition.
He said that if I thought there was a market out there for his
art coatings then he felt I had proved my dedication and he
would sign an exclusive purchase right to me. He would then
sell his Dichroic art coatings to me only in exhange for my
promoting and selling these newly developed coatings for him.
I saw this as an opportunity to raise the
bar on quality in available dichroic materials. If I,
as a flameworker, had access to such a qualified coating technichian,
what could we create? I believe without competition suppliers
become stale and unmotivated to improve their product. If nothing
else, my involvement could spark a revival of quality art coatings
for boroworkers.
In these moments, right after the dawn of a new milenium, Dichroic
Alchemy was born. What followed was an exhausting
year of research headed by myself
and Chris Dawson, Darby Holm, Jason Lee, and an army of close
flameworking friends.*Dichroic Alchemy
was not publicly realized until a year later in 2001 when I
felt we had completed sufficient research to unveil our presence.
During
the course of the next years and continuing today, I work closely
with Dan Coursen sending him samples of flameworked dichroic
to show him effects the flame has on the dichro and trying to
isolate and target which appurtenances
we want to expand upon. He continues to meticulously refine
the technical art coating processes to reflect the needs of
borosilicate flameworkers. Read
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