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.
Just got out of Kirstie Rea's class, where we discussed how the medium influences the art, i.e., since glass has transparency, transparency becomes a significant part of the work. It's one of those "duh" statements that seem obvious on the face of it, but have a much deeper meaning when you think on it awhile. Nowhere, however, did we discuss [...]
