YOU CAN FIND MY GLASS ART IN PERSON HERE:

Edel’s Art Glass – 88 Main Street, Putney, VT 05346 (butterflies, sunflowers, damselflies, orchids and irises, mushrooms, dragons, candlesticks, BIG selection of maple leaves)

Freed Gallery – 6119 Southwest Highway 101, Lincoln City, OR 97367 (damselflies, orchids and irises)

Carefree Buffalo – 130 W California St, Jacksonville, OR 97530 (damselflies, orchids and irises)

Yesterday and Tomorrow – 7506 N Albina Ave, Portland, OR 97217   (butterflies, sunflowers, damselflies, orchids and irises, mushrooms, dragons, candlesticks, maple leaves)

UPCOMING SHOWS:

Cracked Pots 2018

UPDATES: FEATURED ARHIVE – Great Blue Herons, popular for the turn of the century

I’ll be damned if I knew where this fad suddenly came from, probably some celebrity I hadn’t heard about or maybe Great Blue Herons were becoming less endangered, but I liked it and there were lots of them in New England where I, and all three of my customers lived.

However, blue herons particularly presented the dillema of how to get all those big spread feathers in without either spending hours grinding out grooves in the background glass, or spending just as much time making ugly extra solder seams that fool people who have not seen much stained glass into thinking they are “just part of the design”, even though on a gut level they know something’s just somehow average about the piece.

If you ever seen a Great Blue Heron, it’s probably while they are dramatically flapping through the air rather than just standing inconspiuously still in the water waitng to snatch up your thousand dollar coy fish, so I thought it best to suggest flying versions.

With my first one, commissioned by a customer in Londonderry Vermont who had a square space over his fireplace mantle, my solution was to design it so the feathers would flow up close to the corner borders so any extra solder seams would be nice and short, and to further distract the viewer from them plus to give it the extra startle value of one suddenly taking off, I made its two layers of inner feathers stick right out relief style. I had also a big pile of very shiny dichroic glass scraps to experiment with making the reflection of the sun on river pebbles as it comes up and typically washes out the background of whatever you are looking at on a summer day.

Great Blue Heron 1, stained glass and fused glass, 24″X24″, winter 1997

 

 

Great Blue Heron 1 installed, stained glass and fused glass, 24″X24″, winter 1997

 

Not long afterward I got a second comission from a couple in Putney Vermont who wanted a graceful Roger Dean painting-like gliding heron like the one on an Art Nouveau style greeting card someone had sent them, and they also had a square window. This time my solution had to be new and different, and this time it was to make a separate freeform heron and tack solder it onto the base/background glass, which would preserve the grace and simplicity of both the design and the bird, and have the added bonus of a relief dimension.

 

Great Blue Heron 2, stained glass, 30″X30″, spring 1997

 

The third one was for a customer in Leverett Massachusetts, who saw the photo of it, and luckily wanted almost the same design.

Great Blue Heron 3, stained glass, 30″X30″, summer 2001

 

 

 

Great Blue Heron 3 installed, stained glass, 30″X30″, summer 2001