Alicia Lomne and pate de verre

Whew. Been so busy my eyes are crossing (which makes it kinda hard to write), but did want to mention what I’m up to this week: Alicia Lomne’s pate de verre class at Bullseye. I am having a ball, and sorry that the week’s drawing to a close.

Most people employ pate de verre techniques (there are many) to create “classic” vessels, i.e., Art Nouveau/Art Deco stuff: Flowers, bugs, leaves, fish, birds, curly-haired Greek gods with grapes, that kinda thing. I love that stuff–I’d better, since that’s where I’ve been living lately–but it’s fascinating to see what happens when you head it in another direction, as Alicia does.

Alicia’s pate de verre is modern, simple, aesthetically pleasing and absolutely without guile. It also defies gravity (and is a heckuva lot faster than the methods I employ…)

Pate de verre, for those of you that don’t know, is probably one of the first techniques the ancients used to make glass objects, and it’s rediscovered about every other century. In most versions, the artist builds a mold in the shape he wants, packs it with crushed colored glass, and fires it. Pate de verre is French for “paste of glass,” which most people say refers to the glass/water/binder that’s often employed to stick it to the vertical sides of the mold.

In Lomne’s case, she’s making remarkably steep-sided forms, generally without cores, which means there’s a huge chance that the glass will fall away from the sides and into the bottom of the mold during firing. She does some very tight glass frit packing, calibrates the firing speed and temps to the quality of the pack, and slips in just under the gravity wire.

I’ve learned a lot, had a lot of fun, met some good artists…pretty much checked all the boxes I need to call this a topnotch class. We’re not just making test tiles–we’re making vessel forms, and so far there’s some very impressive stuff coming out of the kilns.

As usual, I immediately started chasing difficult; the photo at the top shows my first vessel form this week, which the class nicknamed “the mold from hell.” I built the model in clay, invested it, started painstakingly “inlaying” the first color of glass into all the little rivulets you see, smiling forgivingly when maybe half of Bullseye stopped by to suggest that maybe I should tone it down a bit.

I had an advantage in that I’ve been going PdV for awhile and kinda knew how far I could tempt fate. Still, it didn’t take long to decide that my second classroom vessel would be a LOT less complicated. In the time it took me to finish this one, the rest of the class had probably made 30 or 40 things.

OTOH, that first one came out of the kiln today and I’m mostly happy with it, so can’t complain. I’m more excited about the second piece, which takes a page from the “Emergents” series. If it works–middle-of-the-night doubts about the nose–it should be cool.

I did kinda miss that “go easy on the second one” goal, though. While the shape is a lot simpler, I’ve got some negative slopes in this mold that are gonna give me massive grief, I suspect (below).

Sifting dry powder onto a fresh, wet mold produces a velvety, “flocked” surface that I’d like to reproduce in the final piece sometime. This is the light “coloring” layer that will be followed by three thicker “packing” layers.

Update: Two more pieces coming out of the kiln Sunday, one is a little eerie. I asked Alicia’s permission to go a little more in-depth about her methods in a second posting, and she agreed.

In the meantime, here’s some of the other artists’ stuff, fresh out of the kiln:

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