Welcome To Global Eye Shop & Studio
come visit us in Los Olivos, CA
Shop
Our retail store and online shop began as a way to sell the things we make. As we’ve grown, we have included other artists. Our shop is curated with care. We strive to find unique, quality, handmade items, perfect to give as gifts or to fill your home. If you are in our neighborhood, please visit us at our retail store where we often give workshops and have events.
Studio
Global Eye is a long time collaboration of Michael Robertson and Kristen Cramer, exploring a multitude of artistic directions. Together we live and work in Santa Ynez, California. Our studio is at home; we are constantly working on new products and projects and can’t keep our hands still. We have a dark room, a ceramics studio, an easel to paint at, a printing press, a wood working bench, a vineyard, bees, chickens, and a big organic garden. Who knows what we will make next.
Our Studios carefully throw, build, paint and carve our signature lighting, Vases and Tableware with love.
custom projects
We get asked all the time to try new things and we are happy to make custom projects. Just remember that ceramics take at least 4-8 weeks to properly dry and be fired and glazed.
About Michael
Perhaps Michael became a photographer to get outside; he is an avid fisherman, diver, and hiker, so photography simply comes along for the ride. After attending Brooks Institute for Photography, Michael became passionate about documentary photography and followed stories that took him around the world. His images have won accolades from the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism Competition, the International Photography Awards, and Los Angeles Center for Photography, among others.
His documentary work includes lumberjacks in Romania, AIDS victims in Thailand, honey hunters in Bangladesh’s Sunderbahns, a Haitian Voodoo pilgrimage, Wrestlers in India, Miners in Bolivia, child labor in Egypt, sulfur mining in Java, rickshaw wallahs in Calcutta, ship breakers in Chittagong, and more. He believes that our world is full of disappearing landscapes and vanishing cultures and he hopes to preserve a few through photography.
For our current collection of Michael’s work we have selected a few artist-made darkroom black and white prints from his documentary collection. We have also printed large-scale, modern, color images from his travel stock work. Please look at our online store to see what is currently available.
About Kristen
In 2015 Kristen snuck down to her garage, collected craigslist equipment, and began to experiment and figure out how to make pottery on her own. It took a year, a thousand broken pots, a river of tears and sweat, and an endless amount of devotion. She still has a lot to learn, and is constantly experimenting, breaking pots and weeping tears, and sometimes finding something wonderful.
Though pottery is a relatively new artistic endeavor, art is not. Kristen spent years building websites, designing logos and branding, making floral arrangements, painting, and designing store displays. In college as an undergraduate she studied painting, art history and literature in the College of Creative Studies at UCSB. At Pepperdine University she received a Masters in Business Administration. She began traveling with Michael soon after graduate school, packaging his photography with her writing and design for magazines and companies.
Today she manages the retail shop, runs the pottery studio, and grows roses in her garden. Her pottery can be found only at Global Eye in Los Olivos or here online.