We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Awrylo Jones a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Awrylo, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
Learning an “artistic” craft is unlike any other professional path you can go down in life. It requires determination and hard work to truly make something happen that most people may never have the ability to bring themselves to do. The negatives can certainly be from the overall difficulty of what you’re doing and the financial aspect as it is often costly (especially in a medium like glass or music) to get started. The positives is the independence and the ability to do what you want however you want. The suffering through is what makes it extra rewarding when you come out the other side with knowledge and experience and the survival instinct to keep going. As I always say, don’t give up on things that feel worth it, they maybe the exact thing you were looking for.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’ve been doing what I do for 8+. I got into what I do because I just didn’t want to have to wake up to an alarm clock and the overall desire to not have a real job. I just never had the patience or focus to be able to sit on a hourly pay schedule and do mundane task over and over again. Music and glass are great cause every time you do something it’s going to come out differently than the time before. Both industries I got into through connections I had from when I was a small lad. So mad shout out goes to Aaron Jewitt at Ohio Valley Glass for showing me the trade and Nathan Peters for taking me to my first studio session out in Troy, Ohio.
Really the story is long winded but after 8+ years, you can bet I learned quite a bit. I also teach glass classes now which is cool cause I think it’s a good way to inspire others through something like glass that they maybe didn’t expect.
Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?
They are $@%#ing stupid. When I saw this question it made me think of this conversation I had with a friend about them recently. I remember when NFTs first came out. All these bush league internet musicians were taking it to tiktok and other sites to tell other musicians they were fools for not creating NFTs and selling them to there fans and how it was gonna “make money irrelevant”. Now I bet they feel dumb and shame on them for spouting nonsense like it was ever a reality.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
How funny would it be if I just made the second question about NFTs too? Hahaha I wouldn’t do that to ya though! In my mediums, it’s a lot about failure. Failure is the key part to art no one wants to talk about. Mostly cause it’s the most depressing part. Think about, you spend hours or even days possibly on something or put a bunch of money into something just for it to break or get no response l/reaction. When your medium is what you live for then it can be very crushing to have it all explode in your face. It’s a game where the strong survive. Thats why everyone can’t make a career out of art and that’s fine cause if everyone could then people would probably work fast food jobs just to rebel against societal norms.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/pseudonym_of_ohio?igshid=1eng7m28ekwcy
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/3FJxTAm2MME
- Other: https://linktr.ee/Pseudonymofohio Everything can be found on my linktree above. My glass instagram is @awrylophestaglass and anyone who may want custom glass or a class can reach me there or at my email [email protected]
Image Credits
Photos taken by Chris Corn of Corn Photography or random friends.