Luckydogarts

I started out a ceramic artist, playing with clay from a young age, and I made brown pots for a long time. But my need to color the world sent me looking for it everywhere, until I discovered glass. Its beautiful colors, visual textures, and transformation in the kiln enchanted me, and I fell in love with its translucent properties, which added the aspect of light.

Glass started talking to me in ways I had not imagined. I started seeing the landscape, the sky, and the sea, and soon I was looking into the cosmos. I became obsessed with the horizon line, where the earth meets the sky, the sun emerges and sets, the comforts of earth become the vastness of the unknown, and where we can only guess what lies beyond.

This body of work, “Celestial Bodies,” explores the relationships between the earth, the sun, the moon, and the heavens. I’m inspired by the beginning of a new day with the explosion of the first rays of the morning sun, the subtle, gentle diminishing of light with its setting, and the night sky with its galaxies and stars an unimaginable distance away. I invite you to participate in my attempt to color the world with light.

I use sheet glass designed specifically for fusing. My compositions are created using shards of colored glass and fired in a kiln to a temperature of 1490 ° F. This fuses (melts) all the pieces together to make one solid panel. Multiple firings and layering create depth and visual texture. I often use dichroic, a rainbow colored specialty glass as well as foil inclusions. I make use of frits (ground glass) and hand-pulled strings of glass, as well as transparent and opaque specialty glasses all in a spectrum of colors. I design and fabricate the aluminum channel frames by hand, using stainless steel cable and hardware. Wrought iron stands display the upright free-standing pieces, and the wooden stands are handmade and finished, and are made of mahogany and walnut.