woodeyeglass

I have spent much of the last 20+ years finding ways to express my creativity. I have a mind that is difficult to shut off, and I constantly jot down ideas in notebooks and pieces of paper scattered around the room. It's always been this way for me, kind of an artistic A.D.D. which led me down many paths in my earlier years. I started as most do with pencil and drawing and then began painting, in traditional methods but with abstract and surreal imagery. For awhile I enjoyed it and I had several shows as a painter before I seemed to grow bored and began to explore printmaking, pottery, stone sculpture, welded steel, and eventually by the time I graduated I was working on large scale installation sculptures.

When graduation came I had an offer to attend an intensive art school in LaCoste, France to study stone sculpture, but my artistic wanderlust was already setting in and I was doubting my long term desire to carve stone, so when an offer to apprentice to a goldsmith came up I jumped on it. For the next 18 months or so I focused on silversmithing, with what I felt was great design success, but not adequate financial success. It was during this time that I had opened my first version of Woodeye Studios as a combination silver smithing studio and local art gallery directly above the goldsmith. I had a number of successful shows and was able to give several young and worthy artists their first chance to show their work. So I will always be proud of what I created in that short spell, but alas it did not pay the bills quite well enough being located in a small town in Ohio (not exactly the prime market for my endeavor alas).

Thus ended my artistic wanderlust via the necessity of survival. I traveled west and began a 7 year hiatus from art as I worked in the software industry on a well known (but not worth mentioning) piece of financial software. While it paid the bills well enough, it always left me empty and yearning, and slowly I began returning to my sketchbooks and drawing once again.

When the software overlords deemed it was in their best interest to start shifting work overseas, I got my opportunity to return to my original passion, and restore my creativity to it's proper place in my life. It was during this time that I first began to explore the idea of sandblasted glassware as an artistic medium after seeing an exhibit of etched glass totems from a NW tribal member, a stunning mix of modern technique and traditional design! I also was struck by the fact that while I knew of many glass artists, I knew relatively few that carved glass... and I had already decided if I was going to be serious about returning to my art I would rather find a niche where I could stand out from the start rather then just being one of many. This was in mid 2005 that I began first assembling my equipment and building my studio as I also started plotting out my first glassware designs.

I had a chance to study with the incredible etched glass artist Michael Joplin at the Sonoran Glass Art Academy in Tucson, AZ learning the finer elements of artistic sandcarving and seeing examples of Michael’s ability to stretch the medium to it’s utmost. I have found that so many of the skills I learned in my silver smithing and sculpting days were directly applicable to carving glass, and worked perfectly with my style of pen and ink drawings. It was Michael's idea that I begin exploring glass painting as well after I showed him my first series of etched martini glasses.

I spent the next year teaching myself to airbrush on glass and finding the right combination of paints and techniques to create a beautiful and durable paint finish. Earlier in my time in college I spent a 6 month co-op stint working with a wonderful potter from near Silver City, NM named Kate Brown. It was because of her that when I began painting glass I decided not to just go the usual route and make them for display only, but instead strive to make functional art like hers, and I have now been steadily creating my line of custom glassware since early 2006.

Over the last few years my glassware has been slowly growing in reputation and been featured nationally in Brides magazine and is now part of the permanent collection of the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art in Denver, CO. I have also begun to branch out with a line of laser cut jewelry featuring my original designs... but unlike my younger days where I might abandon one art form as I shift to another, I will continue to expand and refine my glassware line, and offer it directly to you via my Etsy store. As always you can contact me directly with any questions at all, and I try to accommodate as many custom orders as I can. In the end it is always about one thing... giving you my very best!

Thank you for browsing my glassware and jewelry galleries and if you would like to take a look at a sample of my past work in a variety of forms please visit www.woodeyestudios.com.

Cheers!
Jeff