Latest Work

The glass work of Sara Sally LaGrand has captivated me.  I hope I have put enough of my own
stamp on these pieces in doing more realistic flowers.  I found this beautiful cord made with
kimono silk fabric.  The necklaces are finished with Chinese knots and hand-made bronze clasps.

The real inspiration has been to take my glass work further than ever.  I could almost buy Manhatten with all the beads amassed over the years, so I am turning to more sculptured pieces inn the future.
We may not be living in the best of financial times, but that shouldn't stop us from exploring the media we love so much.

These necklaces are currently in a gallery.

Road to Aleppo

I made this bead a while ago, along with  beads from earlier posts, but I have been so
attached to it I didn't want to show it.  Now it is in a gallery, so this is its debut on line.

While I was working on this series of tulips and poppies, with this lovely unpredictable silver glass
base, the middle east was on my mind a lot.   Instead of focusing on the wars, I thought about the often times harsh geology and land of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and then Syria.  And I recalled the discovery of tulips  in the rocky regions of countries like Kazakhstan .  I thought how lovely a tulip or poppy would be by the side of a stoney, dusty road to a place like Aleppo in Syria, and that is what fueled this bead.  It also evokes my passion for the California poppy, one of the few things I miss from home.

I guess this is enough pink for one post!  I envision this bead as a suggestion of a perfume bottle.  I wanted to try having the flower stand proud, on top and this bead turned out very pretty and just what I wanted it to be.

New Work

 My blog has been languishing in the aether for a while now.  When I get to working on my glass it sometimes moves along so rapidly that I neglect to post photos at all.  Each phase kind of cancels out the previous ones. 

But a lot of nice beads have been made in the last six months and I want to showcase a series from late winter that especially pleases me.  After many false starts on these techniques I finally created some beads worth noting!

I have to give copious credit to many glass artists who share their secrets in on-line tutorials.  The challenge is not so much to learn the "tricks" as to take what we learn to new and personal levels, and that can take some time.  In glass it seems there are always a few glitches, never the same ones, but finally a bead will come out glorious, no chill marks, no uneven surfaces, no smeared flower petals, or discoloration from the silver-laden glass included in the design...and best of all, the colors going into the kiln come back out again just as vibrant, or at least transformed to another acceptable or exciting range of colors.
  

I am Back!

It has been over two years...time I spent on other projects that are now complete, and my torch is lit again for making beads. I have so much to show you, but will start with just a few of my favorite beads. I struggled with a lot of styles other bead makers have made popular while I was MIA, but a good friend suggested doing what I love best, so here are some of those beads!

I learned to make roses with glass cane and apply them as murrini within or on the surface of beads. This style of work makes me so happy! Again, Lydia Muell was a great teacher of this type of work, and I thank her profusely.

Elegant maidens, elegant forms...

It is always an adventure to embark on a new style, well, new to me, and see where it goes. As you scroll down you can see the route my mermaids took, from esoteric and colorful in the beginning, to these simple and elegant forms...less is more, they say.

I love the idea of these maids ascending from the nautilus shape, with textured copper electroforming suggesting the sea foam delineating the two elements. The torsos are etched on most of these mermaids, and the swirling, coiling tails are mostly made with silver-based glass which will always yield a surprise set of colors in the end!

I hope you enjoy seeing them as much as I enjoyed making them. And in your seafaring travels you just may see a sea maiden who reminds you of these.

Beware of ladies on seaweed-strewn rocks...!

Yes, these are the stuff of sailor men's dreams.

Under the sea for 80 days...!

The Sirens are calling...the odd, the beautiful, the colorful and the classic. I think Odysseus would have been really late getting home if he had seen some of these girls on his voyage!

The mermaids began as fairly classic forms, in colors, with frit, metallic glass, and of course with tails, even hair in some cases. I began seriously incorporating electroformed details, mainly the belts. Some are left bright, and some were patinated. At some point the mermaids changed their forms, and began emerging from nautilus-like shells. This evolution is a source of joy for someone like me because it shows I really can get out of the box and come up with something new and good. Thank the sea gods for that!

The Earth is balanced on a cusp of weather change these weeks. One day it will be warm, oh say 41 degreesF, and we are all used to that temperature and don't feel cold. With a flick of clouds it will turn damp, foggy, windy, rainy, and downright uncomfortable. But early in the morning and at dusk you can hear a lot of birds, and the feeders are empty every night because of their appetites and the lack of fresh things to eat. They are gearing up for spring and nesting.

Yesterday I saw three glorious male turkeys just about one block from Route One (you know, a highway) in Rockland, so charged and puffed up for mating that they were just about incapable of doing anything but waddle around trying to interest the ten females who were pecking at bird seed on the grass....all dressed up and nowhere to go! I can see why Ben Franklin wanted them to be the national bird. I prefer the working-man look myself. And I definitely admire the nobility of the American eagle.

That's it for outdoors excitement in my part of the Maine landscape. In my studio roses are abundant, still. Here are more of the painted roses I have loved doing, with different background colors, and finally, in Gaffer Glass, from New Zealand...that will be the bead with deep ruby roses that pull you deeply inside their centers, the bead at the top.

Thank you for stopping by. Next time I will take you somewhere totally different!

The Sun, Full Bore!

The Arctic air is blowing through town, but the sun is shining! Although it is distracting as I sit all day at the torch, I love it, even though I have to fight with the bright rays competing with my concentration on a ball of molten glass, I am so happy!

There was that hiatus for one month while I struggled with even more new stuff, and the latest floral beads are the result. I mentioned a new tutorial I have been working on, from Lydia Muell. All of the past month's work has led up to being able to make even more sophisticated roses. And I am learning new ways to "paint" them and their buds and foliage. I don't know why I didn't just take up painting in the first place, since this is just about the most difficult way to do it. Imagine painting with hot fluid glass, on glass, where you cannot exactly mix colors like you can with paint, and you can't remove it once you lay it down.

I hope you enjoy these beads. The largest is about 25cm round, and the longer ones are about 35-40cm long. Some are etched, but that is a leap in faith, believe me, taking the shine off a bead. One never knows wehre the details will go when one does that!

Full Circle

It has been nearly a year since I began my blog here. Once again we are having this teasing weather...sweaters one day, pouring rain and sleet the next, and a mass of mud and ice outside.

My spruce tree is a hub of activity...chickadees, two pairs of cardinals, blue jays, nuthatches, finches by the dozens, all enjoying the various feeders hanging in the tree. And then, if I am lucky, the tribe of twelve turkeys also feeds there, gathering up the carelessly dropped sunflower seeds. And if I am REALLY lucky one of the two woodpeckers will stop by and have a nibble.

Meanwhile I am steadily working on roses. I have a lot to show since my last entry in January so I will begin with these beads. All the flowers here are encased in clear, mostly done in Reichenbach and Gaffer glass. The cool red bead was pressed into a neat shape...looked at from the end it is a diamond form rather than a tubular bead, so there is lots of glass on the edges that adds to the depth of the bead.

I am working on a tutorial by Lydia Muell, and next post I will show the beads I have done with what Lydia has taught me.

Ahhh, winter...

I will not be discouraged, although we should get up to 20 inches of snow in Maine....maybe not here on the coast. I can always go into my studio and conjure more roses to humor myself.
I have added one more bead from Sunday.

There is Always Something to Learn

This past weekend I participated in a roundtable discussion with three other artists from the Flower Power show at CMCA. The two painters, of watercolors and oils, were discussing the process of developing technique and style over time, and also the ways they could erase pencil lines, go away for a while, redo a line...or maybe put their whole bodies into painting a line that traveled over quite a large area. They could draft elements, or they could block out an area for painting their flowers or scenes. The more I listened the more I realized that glass work is really a one-shot deal, and every now and then the whole thing really comes together as something I am proud of and like.

My favorite floral artist in glass, Lydia Muell, has been inspiring me for a while, and some of her beads really do look like paintings. Connie Hayes was talking about the process of painting roses at the roundtable, how she gets the "glow" of a particular rose, or captures its personality...which can change throughout the day as it matures and responds to light. So when I next sat at the torch I attempted a more painterly style, in glass, looking at Lydia's roses and rosebuds, and at Connie's roses, blending colors, laying down good underpinnings for my flowers.

I am ecstatic about these beads, done in Reichenbach and Gaffer glass, 96 COE, because for the first time they subjects don't really look like they are in beads. They are loose and bold...a style I never thought I could emulate. Thank you, artists, for sharing what you know, and thank you glass gods for letting me "get it" once again!

In from the Cold

As cruelly cold as it has been, the inspirations for artists burn brightly in our hearts during these months. While thick fluffy snow fell all day yesterday, my eye was on the pinks and yellows of spring and summer flowers, namely roses. I have added some new elements, along with more variation in the color layers of my leaves...painting, I guess....however I don't know anything at all about painting!

Gifts

It is a freezing cold day, one to keep me in for the duration. I have been reflecting upon the ways we give the intangible to one another...a piece of beautiful music, like the melody you are hearing at this moment from Solas, which I found on a friend's Blog, and which I am learning; or as in yesterday's visit to my friend Tim's photography book store. I was looking at several photographs he has hanging on his walls. I recognized one of the bridge at Big Sur, and commented upon one of an old majestic building in New York City. There was one of several men around some bocce balls, and one of a buffalo on top of a wagon. Tim had been given snippets of information about all these photos, from people who come from all over the world to his store. The bocce players were in France, and some congoscienti could tell him who the famous players were just by the way they stood and wore their pants and shoes (the photo cuts them all off at the waist)! The buffalo was part of a rodeo act. And I had been over that bridge.

I was thinking about all these bits of information as gifts given to Tim over time, and mentioned a book I was reading, The Names of Things, by Susan Brind Morrow. This is the third time I have read it and have never known anyone else who has read it. Tim said it was one of his favorite books. I brought it up because she mentions how, in Egypt, travelling in the 1980's alone, she discovered she could give songs to people, and they would give songs back, just as people gave Tim information about his photos. Nothing material was exchanged, and the gift could be ephemeral or everlasting in the spirits of the recipients. Great gifts!

As an aside, I treasure the gifts of nuance that I find, sometimes, in my beads. The effects are often accidental but I feel a surge of delight when I get it right!