That’s a great question and the answer is a mouthful. As a younger artist I would flit from one medium to another. I would do an airbrush painting, a wood sculpture, then a fiber hanging, a series of pencil drawings……then start the whole cycle over again. When I stumbled into art glass, I was HOME! I still work in other materials, but in service to the glass. One quality that excites me about glass is that, as an art medium, it has the narrowest range of behavior than any other material. That makes successfully manipulating it very challenging. It’s actually very exciting to learn how to bend the rules and get away with it! In some obvious ways glass is weak. In other ways it is very strong. As part of my journey, my natural progression through the world of art. I would do paintings. Then at some point I began paring down the number of colors I would allow in my palate. Narrowing it down to two. Then one color plus black only. Then limiting myself to white-on-white paper embossing….. then finally, clear-on-clear. And one of the great things about working in glass is that you can hide nothing! And…you can only go forward. No going backwards. And then, just to get weird, GLASS is a LIQUID. And I can prove it! If you ever have an opportunity to examine a 100 year old or 200 year old stained-glass window, you will notice that it is falling apart and, most likely, falling out of its lead frame. Go find a piece of the cut glass in it and wiggle it out of its frame. Then look at it from one of the side edges. You should notice that the bottom of the glass is thicker than the top. For real. Glass is a very slow flowing liquid. It just never stops being interesting! And I’m going to stop myself right there before I burn my jaw bearings up!
