Attending a class given by Vera Lightstone's in New York is a gift. http://www.silverclay.com/ An accomplished ceramic sculptor, Vera was one of the earliest adopters and teachers of precious metal clay in the USA. She started teaching classes in PMC and fused glass several years ago, including PMC certification. I've been lucky enough to take a couple PMC classes from her and learned so much. Vera's studio looks south to the city and west to the Hudson. The sun streams in through tall windows and is filled to the rafters with plants, her own work, and art materials for pottery, silver, and glass. There is a sense of clarity, and of possibility. Vera is as gracious and welcoming as she is a solid intellectual contender, mixing comments about the work we're doing with discussions about social justice and the activism she's justifiably proud to have been involved in. For her, the global becomes local... New York is not just a tourist mecca, an international symbol ~ no, New York is her home, and she's going to be a voice for the people who live there. She is strong, incredibly talented, clear, generous, thoughtful and opinionated... some of my favorite traits!
So when I heard about Vera's fused dichroic glass class, I couldn't resist. The class lasts 2 full days, and is a fantastic exploration of the various types of glass fusing out there. We were given a lot of time to play with glass ranging from clear to black, iridescent to dichroic patterns, to translucent but brilliantly colored art glass. There were tiny little designs to place anywhere on or in the glass like mini kokopellis, honeycombs, flowers, and geometrics ~ clear, iridescent, or coated with black.
Glass can be a fussy thing ~ it has certain heat ranges for heating, explansion, vitrification, cooling, annealing... oh my. My little Virgo brain goes crazy at all the possible ways I could go OCD with glass as a craft. And this is why, even though I already have most of the materials needed to create fused glass, I have not gone beyond the most rudimentary experimentation with glass fusing in my own studio. And it's a good thing... I'd been trying to fuse beach glass together at 1500 degrees by putting the glass straight into the kiln. What a recipe for disaster that was!
But at Vera's, emphasis is all on experimentation ~ and she helps her students get right into it by encouraging them to go ahead and start selecting glass pieces right away and start cutting and layering them. By the end of the first day, I went home with about 6 finished pieces. I couldn't wait to show them off! (I had to wait a while, though, because it took around 3 hours for me to drive home, having gotten stuck on the West Side highway for 1 and a half hours!) In any case, getting my hands right on the glass and being allowed to *create* right away helped - pardon the pun -melt away any inhibitions toward the process. More details were to come about the heating and cooling how... we were just asked to create as best we could, that that was so freeing. Gone were my concerns about what it I screw it up and it explodes in glass shards all over the place. I was here to create!!
So here are some examples of the dichroic glass I was able to finish ... it is amazing to see this stuff come into existence!
Of course, dichroic glass is really flashy. (Dichroic means "two colors" - that is, the glass reflects one color, and transmits another) It sparkles and reflects different colors depending on the direction light is hitting it, or you're viewing it. For some reason people seem to like really, really, I mean really bright colors: purple, green, and orange are often put together in almost garish combination with crazy geometric patterns. It can too easily get kitschy and a little too 80's (check this one out...)
<--- Kitschy 80's dichroic glass composition
But if you're smart about bringing together the right color, it's amazing what happens, when some of these patterns are layered and melted in a super hot kiln. They grow into other things. Completely.
So, watch for some of these lovlies to end up in my jewelry sometime soon. And there are a lot more I haven't pictured here... I can't wait! I've gone back to the well, with a little help from Vera, but now it's my turn to make something of it. And make something out of it, I will!
