Bead Designs as Personal Expression.

Help! I have ideas in my head and kids home from school! I can’t get to the torch and I’m going bonkers!

Last I left you I was showing pictures that hang over my work space for inspiration. After that post I went a little nuts. Usually my creative process is pretty methodical…one step leads to another and before I know it I have a new style that I like.

Not this time.

I don’t know what happened. I went big and I went bold. It was the first time I let myself spend an hour (or more) on a bead. Just playing.

I’ve been interested in, what would you call it? Abstract art that celebrates the female form? Ok. Yes. That is what I will call it. One source of inspiration in this area are the paintings of Amy Fraser. Her paintings as well as her polymer clay medallions series’ amaze me.

These beads came about after following a link from her blog to her Book: Dissecting the Western Woman Artist; An Artist’s Dialogue. While they may not look like Amy’s work, her subject matter (both written and otherwise) has opened a door in my soul.

It is interesting to me how inspiration strikes and how we change as we get older. Or I should say, how I have changed as I’ve gotten older.

I have learned to be more appreciative of many things…my own self included. The female form. Other women. Etc. It also amazes me how long it has taken to get to this point. Things that feel so natural to others (like being social and having good girlfriends that I actually want to spend time with) are only starting to come to me in my forties. Not that I haven’t had that before but the difference now is that it feels good.

I am also enjoying the fact that my ’self’, my inner workings, are beginning to express themselves through my work. Whereas once my work was just color and form, now it has deeper meaning. I am starting to understand what it means to leave behind a piece of me in my work…I never understood that. I never felt attached to my work in that way but now I can look back on my pieces and see where I was when they were created. Or be reminded of something that was happening in my life at the time.

Since I have spent a lot of time experimenting with color and what different glass colors do next to each other and on top of each other, my design process is changing. One could study a lifetime on the different reactions between glass colors however I am moving more towards expressing abstract ideas in glass and using the knowledge I’ve gained thus far.

Jeez. I better stop there. But let me just say…if you are starting out in any art, build a good foundation. Master the basics. It may seem tedious but in the end it is liberating!

Lori Greenberg blogs about beads and the business of beads from her studio in Cave Creek, Arizona. You can see more of her beads at her web site: www.lorigreenberg.com.

Tree Spirits: Experimental Sisters to Green Men

 

Tree Spirits.
Experimental glass.
Real soul.

For those of you who do glass, let me just say that these are called “experimental” for good reason. You know I pretty much always ignore the rules and burn the snot out of ivory and turquoise and Nile green, so I’ve gotten used to working hot and big and fast. That doesn’t work so well with transparents like the greens and ambers in these big Tree Spirits. I think I kept doing it, though, because the soulfulness of the faces emerging from the not quite perfect bark was apparent.

The December/January issue of Glass Line magazine has an article I wrote about distilling emotion and pouring it into glass. (I’m the second author down in the bulleted list, Angela Greer Garren.) One of the things I said was that when it comes to working glass, I’m more comparable to a moonshiner than a vintner of fine wines. I work crude, I work fast, and I’m going for the “punch”. I want the emotion in one of my sculptures to knock your senses for a loop, just like the guy taking a swig of Pappy’s moonshine in the song “White Lightning.”

Is this the way I want my glass career to go, eschewing refined skills for crude soul? Right now, it seems that I cannot force myself to work on both aspects. When I do sit down at the torch, I need the creative release of making something that speaks to me, instead of the methodical practice of one skill. Maybe this will change over time. After all, I’m still a relative beginner (it’ll be two years in February). The allure of the flame and using it to create is still strong. Once that levels off, I’m guessing I’ll be ready to make myself a practice curriculum to follow for a portion of each torching day. We’ll see.

AngelinaBeadalina, Angela Greer Garren in the real world, creates glass art and blogs about her life as mom/artist.

Luna and Terranova

I’m a big fan of Double Helix glass and use many of their colors in my beads. One of my recent beadmaking challenges was learning to use their Terra glass. I’d finally practiced with it enough that I was getting good consistent color, and I was loving the bead sets I made with it. Terra had become my favorite glass.

I now have only two 3-inch pieces of Terra left on my bench! I tried ordering more last month but was sad to hear that Double Helix had discontinued making it. Instead they’ve come out with two new silvered glasses, “Terranova” and “Luna.” I ordered a 1/4 pound of each to try them out.

So far I’m finding them tricky to strike, but then Terra was really difficult in the beginning too. Since I’ve practiced so much with Terra, I now have a little bit better idea how to strike color with these new glasses but it’s still going to take practice. Here are my very first experimental beads, first the Luna:

And the Terranova:

The large button focal is Terranova and Luna swirled together and encased. The white speckles on the beads are silver deposits that are part of the color of this glass. …okay and probably some dust too

I’ve made some more beads with Terranova since these photos were taken. I can understand now that I had not been getting the glass hot enough in these practice beads, and so the range of color is not as broad as it could be. The glass didn’t reach a good striking temperature, mostly because I’m used to working cool. Still, the translucent honey-amber color of the Luna is nice, and you can see more color in the Terranova beads when you look at them in the sunlight.

The color is not bad for a start, but the beads I made yesterday with Terranova really blow these practice beads out of the water. I’ll show photos of them in my next post.

By the way, my main inspiration to keep practicing with Terranova and Luna is that Double Helix has offered to make the old Terra again if we can make these new glasses “sing.”
Yay!!!

Back to the torch!
Have a great day everyone!

Stumbling towards my own vision

I wrote last time about taking two classes nearly back-to-back and facing the frustration of learning too many new techniques.

I chose to focus on a couple of them and have been pleasantly surprised to find myself slowly veering towards my own interpretations. The results haven’t always been pretty but with each new effort I find I’m learning more and more about color shifting and layering not to mention shaping. Since I mostly worked with small beads for a long time this shift up to larger sizes is taking a little getting used to.

This series started with an attempt to use dichro at the core. You have to be careful not to burn out the metal so it was a real balancing act getting the layers to melt properly without overheating the core. Then it all went south on me and rather than toss the bead into the water pot I decided to see what I could do to salvage it. After a lot of pushing and pulling and tweaking I finally gave up and went for a heart shape.

My next attempt (do I EVER learn?) involved adding a wide stripe of gold aventurine to the layers. Same problem as with dichro … overheat and you burn it out. This time was even more problematic because the aventurine was near the top layer. And the colors I used were a bit on the dark side. I had envisioned something a little more “leafy” and was a bit disappointed to find how dark this came out:

My final effort went back to the more girly shades of purples and pinks, a combination I truly love. And no, there isn’t a chip at the top of the bead. Too much transparent glass and it looks like someone took a bite out of it.

I like that palette of colors and now am trying to decide what might enhance the base bead. A drift of tiny blossoms, perhaps? I like the little dots but feel this need to add something a bit more distinctive. More me to the mix.

Darleen Michael-Baker is a glass beadmaker who blogs out of her home studio in Sheridan, WY.

Honest Abe, Two Squids and A Way Out

Well, this week I’m learning reverse painting techniques as outlined in Jim Kervin’s book about Bronwen Heilman. Reverse painting is a technique where you paint a backwards version of a desired image on a piece of glass, fire it and then apply the glass painted side down to a cylindrical bead. This book is an excellent guide for reverse painting and a bunch of other techniques. Every bit of information you need to paint on glass is right there. My problem is that I am a picture-looker more than a careful reader. I think I’m reading carefully but I’m not because I’m too busy thinking about what I want to do. Basically, I have to screw up first before I go back, carefully read the instructions and get it right. That’s just how I learn.

So I think it’s going to take a while, learning this painting thing. Right now I’m focused on wrapping a large piece of sheet glass with a black outlined drawing on it around a bead without it or the bead breaking. I’m not paying much attention to background, I just want to see my little drawing on the bead. (I’m still waiting for UPS to deliver my colored paints, too, so there isn’t much I can do but draw in black and white.)

Many things about this process are blowing my mind. First and foremost is the amount of detail you can render in your drawing and the ease with which you can do this. Before I bought the Kervin book I did not know it was possible to use an ink pen (similar to a fountain pen with a fine point) containing glass paint to draw on glass. I always thought you had to use brushes and since I don’t particularly care for the results I get with brushes I never really wanted to paint on glass. But if I can use a pen I can reproduce whatever I can on paper on glass. That opens up a whole new area of weird images on beads. I can’t stop thinking about it.

The labor intensiveness of this process is another thing that is hard to grasp. Right now my black outline pictures aren’t taking too much time because they only have to be fired once before they’re applied to the bead. Full color paintings like the ones Heilman makes are painted in layers and have to be fired four or more times before applying them to the bead. It does not get any more labor intensive than that…unless you’re also fabricating your own silver bead caps for the beads, which she also does.

So, anyway…it’s been 5 days since my life changed when I realized that you can draw on glass with a pen. Since that time I’ve finished three beads, two of which broke. I also made a bunch of little glass paintings that are waiting for color. Here’s a picture of the first bead I made. It’s the one that did not break.

It’s Abe Lincoln in a tiny car! Of course it is. I’ll tell you all about my choice of subject matter in another post ’cause that’s a whole story in itself. The second bead I made is hideous so I’m skipping to the third. The white core on this one broke and partially healed. I think it’s stable so I’m wearing it.

It’s squids! Since this one has two paint layers, white over black, the glass square had to be fired twice before I risked it’s life wrapping it around the bead. The were numerous other pitfalls besides getting the square of glass (about 2×2″) around this bead. Such as…my white bullseye glass has been getting extremely dirty for no apparent reason. Also, there’s a lot of sludgy stuff around the edges of the glass square. You’re supposed to be able to skim that scum off once you get good enough at this that you’re not absorbed with thoughts about your painting breaking when you’re putting it on the bead. I’m thinking that switching to a darker background might be easier so I’m going to give that a whirl. Stay tuned.