What’s the right mix of art and business for you?
By Annie Osburn

Denise Wallace's Old Bering Sea III pendant of sterling silver, 14K gold, and scrimshawed fossilized walrus tusk. The fish can be removed and worn as a pin. Photo: Mark Nohl.

When you’re an artist, you have to look at the context of your profession as something that lasts a lifetime,” says Lainey Papageorge, jewelry designer and former owner of the Illumina gallery in Atlanta. “It’s not just something that pays the bills. You have to nurse it, take care of it, and treat it like something that’s valuable and worthy. [But] like the snake shedding its skin, you also have to be willing to leave things behind and let them die.”

A pair of Breadfruit earrings of sterling silver, 14- and 18K gold, and carved fossilized walrus tusk by Denise Wallace. Photo: Mark Nohl.

Finding the right balance of creative design time and what is needed to manage a business is not just a pursuit for the well-seasoned jewelry artist. Even novices must balance time to reflect, design, and produce what’s essential to market their product, show it, and (hopefully) sell it. In fact, it’s not just about finding balance. It’s about striking a compromise between art and business. In her book, Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul — A Woman’s Guide to Promoting Herself, Her Business, Her Product, or Her Cause with Integrity and Spirit, Susan Harrow stresses that you can’t achieve your goals if you’re playing by someone else’s rules. In fact, marketing yourself, and your work, does not necessarily have to mean compromising your values or your quality of life. “Don’t wait until you’re dying to make your choices,” Harrow writes. “Exercise your choice muscle regularly to keep it flexed and sturdy . . . your children, your family, your friends, your colleagues, your community, and the world will remember you for it.”

Many designers live with tunnel vision, only focusing on getting their work recognized. While that pursuit can insure survival, it also can devour years of time and energy. Designer Denise Wallace achieved a high level of success with her unique figurative pieces, famous for their scrimshaw detailing, while working with her husband, Sam Wallace, from their home base in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At one point, the two managed 10 employees and showed their work in nearly 40 galleries and retail outlets across the country. But after more than 20 years living and working in the Southwest, Wallace and her family moved to Hawaii in 1999. “I’d reached a plateau in my personal and business life. We needed to create more of a challenge for ourselves in our field professionally,” she says. “Also, I felt like Santa Fe was not the place for us anymore. Our kids were 16 and 14 at the time and the crime rate was increasing.”

Raised in Seattle, Wallace’s mother was an Aleut and this cultural influence runs deep in her design aesthetic. Wallace’s husband selects and cuts the stones, such as fossilized walrus tusk, turquoise, sugilite, petrified dinosaur bone, and lapis, while Denise performs designing, metalwork, scrimshaw, and finishing. Together, she says, they spend almost as much time finishing the pieces as they do soldering and fitting stones.

“Before, in Santa Fe, it was like we worked and worked and worked. I spent a lot of my summers indoors working and having children,” Wallace recalls. After making a trip to Hawaii with a group of artists in the early 1990s, Wallace fell in love with the landscape. “My husband and I were really intrigued with the idea of moving. We had just started to downsize our business. Until that point, we had quite a few employees and were selling all over the place. I wasn’t really happy in that situation. I was running a studio full of people, as well as managing it all. We downsized, brought our kids into the business and taught them what we were doing, started home-schooling them, and moved to Hawaii.”

One of Ricky Frank’s cloisonné pins. Photo by Ricky Frank.

Family-influenced, Atlanta-based enamel artist Ricky Frank had a similar turn in his professional life. After more than 20 years on the business-building treadmill, Frank realized other priorities three years ago when he and his wife, Pat, adopted their daughter, Lily, from China. “The biggest turning point for me, though, was back in the mid-’80s. I had already decided that I couldn’t support myself with my artwork,” Frank admits. “I had a list of reasons why I couldn’t sell it. I had gotten my Master’s degree in psychology and wanted to be a sports psychologist for kids. I had studied about self-esteem and self-image and one night I had to count my pennies to go to the grocery store. I decided I couldn’t do it any longer, and decided to apply everything I’d learned as a sports psychologist to myself.”

Ricky Frank’s cloisonné pin in high-karat gold with stones chosen to complement the colors of the enamel use dreamlike imagery reminiscent of Matisse and Chagall. Photo by Ricky Frank.

In order to hone his focus, Frank combined the nontraditional tools of visualization and meditation with more traditional goal-setting techniques to turn his career around. “I was coaching soccer and supporting myself at craft shows. I knew that to be good at anything, you have to be committed. Finally, a friend dragged me to a guide visualization meditation night and during a visualization it hit me there was a way of thinking that could connect my two passions.”

Frank’s limited-edition sterling silver cloisonné enamel jewelry and one-of-a-kind pieces in high-karat gold feature colorful and illuminating tones combined with stones such as amethysts, tourmalines, pearls, and diamonds, in designs often reminiscent of the dreamlike imagery of Klimt, Chagall, and Matisse. “I remember thinking that I didn’t have the money or confidence I needed,” says Frank. “I didn’t believe I could make it because the work took too long, no one appreciated it; it was too complicated. In order to progress as a jewelry designer, you have to invest, buy a good booth. I wasn’t convinced it would be a worthwhile investment. But one changing moment was when I started to set goals for myself. My first [goal] was to reach $40,000 in sales that year. I picked the number out of a hat and it was probably four or five times more than I’d ever made.”

Frank reached his $40,000 mark. “I would visualize myself juggling a big ball with $40,000 on it. The next year, I visualized $70,000 and came within $1,000 of that goal.” Soon, Frank began hiring apprentices to help with production. The expansion increased his commitment level. Frank’s business continued to grow, although he did only five or six craft shows a year, due to the time-consuming nature of cloisonné.

“Then I reached a point where I got seven rejections from retail shows in a row. I realized that I had my income tied to a few people who looked at slides for a few seconds. I applied to ACC at Baltimore and drained any savings I had to pay for an extra employee and promotional material. We did well and our business took off. Since then, I’ve been trying to do a balance between retailing and wholesaling. As things got bigger, we took a lot of orders, got a lot of buyers, and then maxed out. I started feeling I wasn’t having enough time to design. Every year, I would say I would take time off and it never happened. Part of it was that the business was doing well and the economy was doing better and it was hard to stop.”

Lainey Papageorge's cuff bracelet of sterling silver and 14K pink gold set with spinels, carved moonstones, and zircon; Photo: Art Science.

“You have to discern what serves the higher goal of producing top-quality work that has an underbelly of soul to it,” notes Papageorge. “I don’t want to just make money because other people can be duped into wearing something I’ve made. My priorities are what best serves the creative process, how to find outlets, and how to stay organized and manufacture my work. What I have maintained in my business today are the things that I can manage and still be able to do what it is I’m supposed to be doing as an artist, a mother, and a business person.”

Before closing her gallery a few years ago, Papageorge showcased the works of 60 to 70 jewelry artists with a special focus on lapidary art and carved objects. “The corporate structure of running a business finds you paying all the self-employment tax and insurance, and dealing with all the hassles of a company where you have to keep all the employees and their families happy just to be able to sell your work and have a high-visibility gallery. When the economy gets shaky, it really impacts your life. You spend your time doing everything else rather than your work,” she says. “It has to do with letting the business eat you up. Really good business people need to put in those 20-hour days. That trait works when you’re climbing up the ladder. But when you get to a certain point, you need to discern what serves you versus what is spinning the wheel.”

Dressed to Kill pendant by Lainey Papageorge, with a capybara molar, carved rhodonite, rhodolite garnet, and a Great White shark’s tooth, set in sterling silver and 14K pink gold; Photo: Jennifer Marshall.

Papageorge recalls when she made the move from Atlanta to Ithaca, New York, while still running her gallery long-distance. The move was an effort to bring balance to her work life. However, she soon saw that the gallery couldn’t survive without her. “For me, being in two places didn’t work. Illumina may have looked okay to the uninitiated, but the internal workings were not healthy. My manager was burned out from not being able to handle the creative, employee, and clientele aspects on her own.”

Now focusing on her own work, Papageorge has found that the differences lie in the growth, heft, and weight of her business. There are fewer corporate perks today, she admits, and no corporate veil to hide behind. She’s scaled down on eating out, renting cars, and any number of things that businesses often allow. With this has come a freeing up of her creative side that was once smothered. No longer sitting at the bench, her labor and bookkeeping are farmed out, as well. “I used to be embarrassed about that. But now I realize that what I do best is working with the stones and the design process. I feel good about the work I’m turning out now,” she adds.

“Being home when the kids come home from school and being able to take them to soccer practice at 4:30 wasn’t a possibility before. Having the freedom to manage my life in a productive way, rather than my life managing me, has been a gift. In the long run, it might not be as good in terms of income. But I have more contentment. Money can’t buy that. I never got to watch sunsets like I do now. Years went by and I was in my gallery in a shopping mall or on the telephone.”

Lainey Papageorge's Go Fishing pendant of Montana agate, hessonite garnet, boulder opal, and a Mako shark’s tooth, set in 14K yellow gold and sterling silver, Photo: Jennifer Marshall.

Frank’s business and creative priorities also shifted with the call for more personal reflection. “When we came back from China with Lily, it hit me that I no longer had the time for myself. I had a major time commitment. We’d always known we were going to share the responsibility of raising Lily. I started working a lot less in the studio. I didn’t stay on top of things as much as before, but I laughed a lot more than I ever did,” he says.

With new commitments and passions, Frank made changes in how his business worked. Some of these changes included paring down staff, while letting go of control and learning to delegate responsibility so that he could put more creative time into his life, design more, and do the things that help lead a business. “I’m exploring other ways to work. I’m learning a Cad/Cam program for casting. I started my Web site last year and recently had a half-price sale for local customers.”

While some designers find new technologies aid their progress and ability to maintain balance, Papageorge opted not to pursue the Internet. “The process of sitting at the computer wasn’t worth it for me. It just took too many hours a day to manage. I would rather be talking to or meeting with people. I’d rather be on an airplane traveling to meet and work with people, instead of sitting in front of a computer.”

Frank, however, finds that the Internet has opened up new avenues for his work with his current site, www.rickyfrankenamels.com, which features pieces from his Quilt series. In this series, Frank says that he’s looking at the balance of everything in his life. While most of the pieces have a central image, he says they represent different aspects of his life; even the ladybugs represent his daughter’s favorite motif. “Having a child is really affecting how I look at my work now. I am looking at the world through a child’s eyes of discovering joy. There’s a little bit of joy in everything I do,” says Frank of his brooches, earrings, bracelets, and cuff links.

“Now the challenge is learning how to incorporate the Internet into our business, which includes galleries that I don’t want to be in competition with, while not keeping other wholesale customers away,” he says. “I plan to have two different Web sites, one only for retail customers, specials and discounts, and a generic Web site where anyone looking for me on the Internet can find me, and find my gallery shows, too.”

For Wallace, downsizing was a family affair. She and her husband began home-schooling their children while still living in Santa Fe and her daughter (who now attends the Fashion Institute of Technology to study jewelry design) and son continue making jewelry and contributing to the family business. “Technically, they both know everything that we know. I feel like I’m still transitioning a bit after moving to Hawaii,” admits Wallace, who now does three shows a year and sells her work through a gallery in Vermont, the museum shop at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Santa Fe Indian Market. She also has plans to start a Web site soon. “We just got our studio built. I keep telling myself that it was okay to take some steps back and work toward something again. And, I couldn’t be happier.”

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To contact Lainey Papageorge, call (607) 277-3092, e-mail papageo555@aol.com, or send mail to 167-1 Calkins Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850; to contact Ricky Frank, visit his Web site at www.rickyfrank.com or call (770) 552-7890; Denise Wallace may be contacted by mail at P.O. Box 192, Hilo, HI 96721, or through her Web site at www.denisewallace.com.

Annie Osburn is a freelance writer based in Boulder, Colorado, and is a frequent contributor to Lapidary Journal. More work by Lainey Papageorge, Denise and Sam Wallace, and Ricky Frank are now online in our Designer’s Gallery, www.lapidaryjournal.com/gallery/