Some guy posted on the azb pool forum about a case that had been through a fire.  This is another example of why cue protection matters.  The guy is obivously taking a cheap shot at me but hey I will take all the examples of why protection matters that I can get.   http://forums.azbilliards.com/showthread.php?t=272864

I am a dick.  I screw people's hopes and dreams.  Often someone will come to me with a vision for a case and I enthusastically walk with them and talk about their vision.  I get caught up in thinking about how their case would look and promise to make it.  

The problem is that my enthusiasm oversteps my ability.  Since I can't say no I try to take on everyone's requests and almost always I find myself at the center of many such conversations where I promised to make someone's dream come true but am failing to deliver.  It's not because I can't do the work.  Hell I have 10 people working for me who can make just about any cue case that can be conceived of.  It's precisely because we often turn out work that other case makers can't do that I am approached.

And I want to make all these great cases that my customers and myself envision.  But the nature of reality is that things get built in the imaginary space far easier than in the real world.  In the real world people have sore fingers, leather is inconsistent, people get in bad moods, people are lazy and uninspired, artists can't translate your fantasies, mistakes are made and just life in general conspires against the best of intentions.  It takes hard work to be consistently creative and cut through life's clutter.  I am a lazy dick who doesn't want to put in that amount of work.  I want to have ideas and sit on a hill top and communicate those ideas to a bunch of hardworking folks who will carry out my ideas faithfully and flawlessly.  Sounds a bit familiar doesn't it?  In any event any artist likes to hear praise like this;

Jack,, from my very first case 2×4, to my second 2×4 Andy Stevens tooled, to the third 3×6, to this ross tooled 3×6 beauty being my fourth, and meeting you this year at SBE i love your work. I dont have any of the first three cases any longer, the tooled extreme 3×6 by you and Mr. Ross is what I have of yoursand truly charish. You are great to talk to via email, the phone, and in person, you also make a promise on things that you keep. You do what ya say and say what ya do!,period and i respect that alot. Your work is excellent and prices are fair.

Id never sell this case, its not for sale, and will only be in my old days when I give up pool for good, so so give it 20years +lol

Thanks Jack and Ron
P.S. Cant wait for the 2×4 gray elephant with black ross tooled accents/pockets!

It is in reference to this case:  http://forums.azbilliards.com/showthread.php?t=233384

Which is an absolutely stunning piece of work done by master tooler Ron Ross and assembled by cue case maker Jack Justis.  The owner heaps praise on both men deservedly so.  But he is also heaping criticism on me for failing to deliver on making a case he ordered a long time ago.  We had agreed to trade for a Justis 3×6 and I had agreed to make him a very nice case.  Nothing to hard but I completely let him down.  So as much as Jack and Ron deserve praise for this case I deserve every bit of criticism contained in this passage.

The proverb goes "be careful what you wish for because you may get it".  I have longed to have a shop capable of producing cases of this caliber and beyond.  This case represents an amazing marriage of 40 years of solid leather tooling mastery and 20 years of solid cue case making.  Our shop now is capable of doing all the technical aspects of making cases that go far beyond what Mr. Justis chooses to do.  Not a knock on him as he has settled for a particular well-defined style and limited options to make his cases.  We have chosen to be fairly unlimited in our approach to case making.  This has it's advantages as we are able to make each case to the customer's desire with little compromise on the customer's side.  And the disadvantage is that we have many details to contend with that our competition does not.  Get one wrong and we are taking the case apart and rebuilding it.  Obviously this slows down the process considerably.  So anyway I have what I wished for and now I have to learn to control it.

My wife, who deserves a ticker tape parade down Wall Street for putting up with me, is helping me to herd these cats and organize our little workshop into a super-efficient machine that turns desire into reality without me gumming up the works.  My friend Sean Leinen calls the IT wizards pizza-under-the-door guys.  People who sit in their super-cooled environments and work tech-magic and don't want to be bothered except by a pizza slid under the door every couple days.  That's my next wish.  I love making cases.  I love making people happy.  I don't like pissing people off and dashing their expectations.  So if I have been a dick to you or your order through a heavy flirting session followed by neglect, I am sorry.  I can't promise to get much better about it but I can promise that as a team we are all working to make your cases.  I hope that I don't get any more of these backhanded rebukes which I deserved.

The case however is now for sale if someone else wants to own this masterpiece: http://forums.azbilliards.com/showthread.php?t=242332

I doubt that the current owner is looking to order from me but if he does this time we are ready to rock it.

Sincerely,

John Barton – crazy case maker.

And what are they worth to you?

If you asked a craftsman or an artist to make you an absolutely unique piece for you that they would never reproduce at all in anything even close what would that be worth to you?  To have the only one of it's kind made by that person or shop?

And what do you consider to be unique?

Recently I had a rather sad experience that should have been a good one.  

A few years ago we built this case for a collector in Germany,

I called it the Palace Garden.  

It has been the centerpiece of our creativity for a while.  We worked on it for nearly a year with revisions and requests from the customer.  It's fair to say that while we charged a good amount for the case that when the time spent is added in then we didn't really get rich off of it.  We charged a fair price for the work and put more into it than we charged for.  In addition I invented a few new ways to construct a leather case along the way.

So this year we were approached about building a similar case for another client.  I told them the same thing I tell everyone which is that I will not duplicate a case exactly.  With the exception of the basic patterns we use I will not duplicate the decorative design of a case.  Sometimes when the case is so simple there isn't any way around it as when someone asks for their name inside a circle.  But for a case of this level we will do a unique hand drawn pattern based on the same general theme.  The German collector was into orchids so we did all orchids for the color flowers except for the lotus which was taken from a tattoo on his neck and the bottom which is the peony being the closest to a national flower that China has.

So when asked to do a similar themed case for a Chinese customer I chose to make it more Chinese with the inlay on the back and the flower choices and the layout of the pattern.  I kept some construction elements the same so as to get the same overall feeling with two different cases.

And actually the whole "Garden" theme was started with this case I called "A Garden Day"  back in 2007.

So my question to you dear readers is who owns the growth of art?  I can certainly understand when a customer buys an expensive piece of art and does not want to see that art reproduced in any fashion.  The German collector was upset that I produced another case that looked anything like his.  But I have to ask why?  The case is not an exact reproduction nor is there any decoration on it that was taken from the first one.  It is a sister to the first one by the fact that both share my artistic DNA.  

I ask who owns the GROWTH of art because that is how I see it when I take something I did before and I build on it to make another piece.  I see it as an expansion of an idea rather than a simple copy.  Who says that concepts in art have to end with one piece and that the artist is forever forbidden by the sale of that piece from further exploring that concept?  Did Georgia O"Keefe paint one giant flower and stop or did she paint dozens?  

So on looking at these cases what price would you have offered me never to make another one?  I am curious as to what value you would place on buying a man's soul?