Stay Tuned

This blog is temporarily down for maintenance while I ramp up the new Web site which will be launched in June. Until then you can find me on twitter and facebook. Hope to see you there!

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Glass people often say to each other: What's in your kiln today? Well here's what was in my kiln yesterday and today.

Hi Again!

Today is day 2 of firing "Glass Sarah" and I must say it's disconcerting to have my own eyes staring back at me. I kind of feel like Dr. Frankenstein. This needs more firing!

Hi!

I'm working on my self portrait in glass -- but I'm not quite finished yet.

Luscious Lilies

I just finished the second firing on tiger lilies I created with small chunks of glass and ground glass powders. I am not quite finished with this piece -- and I have not yet formed it into a bowl shape.

Fusing is Fun for the Whole Family!

How Did This All Begin?

As a small child I used to pick up a writing implement and simply draw what was in front of me, sometimes for hours. I drew this picture (top) as a 4-year-old while sitting on my front porch observing a wasp's nest. I used oil pastels.

Somehow I got busy with other endeavors and didn't draw much again until 1993. On a hot summer day while interviewing a Florida artist in her studio a pile of colorful swatches of painted fabric caught my eye. I felt my heart leap and said: "I need to be doing some of this. I mean it. I need to be painting." She said: "Why don't you take a class?" And so I took an oil painting class.

The painting above was my third -- but it wasn't truly mine. The instructor told the class to emulate artists we admired in order to learn about brush strokes and color mixing. I adored French post-Impressionist Cezanne's still life work so I created a Cezanne knock off. Somebody offered to buy this painting but I wouldn't part with it.

I was hooked on art and became a class junkie. Over the last decade I worked by day as a journalist, while taking art classes by night. Then I found glass fusing in a friend's kitchen three years ago. It was holiday time and the two of us, along with several other friends, were making fused glass votive holders as gifts.

Eventually, my friend, a talented stained glass artist who owns a tiny tabletop kiln that seemed to be running 24 hours a day, gently suggested I buy my own, since her kiln was getting tired from overuse. Since then I have been traveling the country, as time has permitted, to focus my studies on fusing glass.

Concrete Dreams

I recently hand-troweled and stained this concrete kitchen floor. I kinda like it.

The Mad Sunflower

" ... my love is a mad sunflower that forgets
fragments of sun in the silence"

-- Isabel Fraire

Art Quotes I Have Been Hoarding...

I have been hoarding these art quotes and now I share them with you....

“The color shrieked.” Edvard Munch, on “The Scream.”

<>“I’m glad I haven’t found my style yet. I’d be bored to death.” – Edgar Degas <>

I mean you know, if the audience ain’t gonna dance then I’m gonna do their dancing for ‘em, they can watch me have a good time." Pete Townshend

<>“Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.” – Michelangelo

“Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.” – Balthus

“Believe it or not, I can actually draw.” – Charles Baudelaire

<>“I think that the very earliest influence was a horror of having to work in a bank or an office, a desire for a free and creative life.” – Friedrich Nietzsche <>

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” – Hans Hofmann

“I don’t get into “becauses.” When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go to the one I like most. If you start to say “because” you get into art jargon.” – Albert Einstein

<>“My breakthrough came very late in life, really only starting when I was 50 years old. But at that time I felt as though I had the strength for new deeds and ideas.” – Hans Hofmann

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” – Robert Hughes

<>
“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” – William Shakespeare

“Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.” – Henri Matisse

<>“After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.” – Henri Matisse <>

“You can’t be at the pole and the equator at the same time. You must choose your own line, as I hope to do, and it will probably be color.” – Vincent Van Gogh <>

“I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.” – Marc Chagall

“I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.” – Marc Chagall

“My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent.” – Marc Chagall

“You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.” – Salvador Dali

<>“When I paint, the sea roars. The others splash about in the bath.” – Salvador Dali

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” – Salvador Dali

A Little About Me

I worked as a journalist for nearly two decades when on sabbatical I became hopelessly hooked on fusing together tiny chunks of stained glass in a friend's kiln. Three years and five kilns later I had a studio in San Diego, my original art glass creations were carried in several Southern California galleries and shops. I specialize in making two-dimensional images with fused glasses and enamels. Recently I began accepting commissions for handmade sinks, light fixtures, tiles and back splashes. As a sideline I enjoy making mosaics and concrete sculptures. Much of my work is made from recycled materials. I have studied with some of the world's top glass artists. In 2008 I won First Place in the Emerging Artists category at the annual juried show presented by the Art Glass Association of Southern California. The show was held in Studio 21 of the Spanish Village Art Center, Balboa Park, San Diego. In the summer of 2009 I studied at the Pilchuck School in Stanwood, WA, founded in 1970 by Dale Chihuly.