The grey tweed effect was SUPPOSED to be pure French Vanilla, punctuated by small transparent lines of intense color. Instead, I got a motley assortment of greys and lavenders mixed with French Vanilla.
On the production side of the house, I have four series I really enjoy working on: Crystals, Sand, Shards and Sacks. I've talked about the first three a bit, and was getting around to Stacks when a commission piece blew up on me this morning. Damnation.
To tell the truth, I don't think I've made a traditional fused piece of glass, i.e, a full, flat fuse of a bunch of cut sheet glass pieces that I then slump into a vessel form, in a long time. That direction seems a lot more limited than using sheet only as a foil, or structural support, for the near-infinite number of things you can do with frit.
Drove up to Hood River yesterday to participate in the "Art Walk,"this time as artist, not tourist, and I had a blast. I now see why people do these things, even if they don't get rich.
There's been some interest on warmglass lately about doing chunky, frosted glass vessels like the one above (and also the one at the top of this blog), something I've been experimenting with ever since my parents' big glass display doors came down. I take pretty extensive notes (and pictures) of my experiments, so I thought I'd post a longer explanation here...
As much as I like working with larger forms of glass, you just can't beat frit for infinite possibilities...I particularly enjoyed one experiment--packing powder into simple geometric shapes and letting it fuse into glossy pyramids and circles and squares. So, just as fun exercise, I decided to do a whole piece this way, with a few twists.
So StumpBowl, my first playing around exercise in a long while, is done and I think I have managed to create the vitreous equivalent of the hooked rug. Humpftt. I've learned some valuable lessons, though.
I'm taking a brief hiatus from my pate de verre while I figure out where I'm taking color in casting. Sometimes when I get stuck, playing around with the glass helps me kickstart work in the problem area. So...I'm playing, and I'm trying to concentrate more on texture than color. Hence Stumpbowl.
I decided to see if I could do one of the most basic operations--putting a foot on a piece--during the slumping process. So I chose Bullseye's square glass bowl, a fairly deep slumping mold, built a foot at the bottom of it, and slumped a blank over it. Didn't work. The bowl looks exactly the way I anticipated...but it cracked on three of four corners. Drat.
Held an informal workshop in my studio a few weeks ago--enjoyed it very much and my "students" appeared to get a kick out of it as well--and Mom suggested that she would like to do some glasswork, too. She's a terrific ceramic artist; some of the pieces she's thrown for my birthday/Christmas gifts are among the favorites in my collection. Ceramic artists have a pretty ingrained understanding of the effects of heatwork, and we've often discussed the differences between ceramics and glass in that respect, so I figured she'd take to it. She did, like a duck to water.
