Internal Landscapes

Finished the piece begun in the previous piece, utilizing single cubes of safety glass in black iridescence and clear glass gilded in copper on found cedar scraps. Micromosaic style, i.e. set in piece by piece, nothing in between.

Internal landscape, constantly shifting.

Getting Small 1 of 3

I am working with single cubes, mostly, in this, the first of a three panel set, inspired by Italian micro mosaic, most often used in jewelry, fitting together near slivers of glass or ceramic.
Here, rendered with clear glass gilded with copper foil and near opaque black glass, courtesy of 3 different car accidents on my corner, on found cedar scrap. 7 x 5"
Abstract. the pieces are small. Close up is larger than actual size.

Vertigo

New work.
Blue glass backed with silver foil. Very small pieces.
Black glass. Car accidents are up 500% in the past 6 months on my street, hooray for progress.
Pearls of varied sizes. On found wood, untreated. 12 x 12"
I haven't felt like posting until this piece. One with flash, one without.

I am (also) a car crash

Yet another car accident. I just rewatched the Herzog "30 Seconds...", about driving and texting. Spoiler alert: it takes an anti stance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk1vCqfYpos

Sometimes people miss that my work is, at its base parts, the after effects of an act of violence. Things don't break so easily, bringing them back together as a new whole doesn't heal the shatter.

Light blue wind shield glass (the blue was washed out, too rainy to photograph outside) gilded in silver, red reflector, also silver gilded. On painted wood.

Blackstar

The title just happens to work. Happy Holy Day!

Mirror, mirror, 1920s black bakelite art deco vanity mirror gilded in silver with silver gilded clear safety glass, black windshield glass, shell button, black pearl, assorted freshwater pearls. Fairest of them all.

Landscape, underground

20 x 20

Chained

12x 12
Black stained glass scraps, electric blue glass from another glass artist's scraps, faux gold chain
gold foil, silver foil.

Blue Velvet

"That's a human ear all right"

I tried new things. Abalone shell and silver gilded blue windshield glass, mirror bits, sea glass, seed pearls on silver pigment painted textured wood12" x 12"

Parallel Lines

I've done a bunch of new work, but only feel like posting this one right now.

I titled this before watching Blondie's New York, which is about the making of the titular album.

Topography of a feeling

Rusted chain and windshield glass with tiny, clear glass spheres (they are not beads; no holes). Chain and spheres were given to me by S. White. Windshield glass backed with gold and silver foil. Three shades of gold pigment, two of silver. On found wood textured with wax.

Wilted Rose City

Update to post. I finally titled the piece. Brought to you by the "progress" on Division Street. Seriously, people no one, and I mean NO ONE calls it "D-Street". Stop trying to make it happen. The old Oregon theatre is still there, and while I am not a patron, I may give them a donation to stay in the neighborhood.

I saw a bumper sticker yesterday, which succinctly put my feelings to words. It's been so long since a bumper sticker did anything but give me secondhand embarrassment: Fred & Toody, NOT Fred & Carrie. Amen.


Center: red glass rose from broken cocktail ring. Blue wind shield glass, cabochons. Below, veins of copper pigment painted glass with layers of (mikimoto seed & rice pearls) pearls, pre-ban red coral, tiny shells, crystals. Other glass backed in silver, gold, copper foil.

It's pretty. It also is in the private collection of a lovely couple in California (previously of PDX).
I have more pictures, but I promised I would put this up for someone to see. [per request] Mostly strangers look at my pictures, which is lovely.

"These Streets Will Never Look The Same"

More geometric stylings in a cool color palette.
Has a certain musicality and reminds me of a cityscape without being representational or on purpose. Glass scraps from Bullseye: iridescent, fused, slumped. I don't cut the glass, it is used as found, these are the things that would be thrown away or recycled.

Gilded with silver foil on silver gilded board. 12" x 12".. I liked the straight/almost straight lines and the colors: from electric blue to deep purple to cobalt, to green, to sky blue marbled in white, like a cut of sky.I wish I could capture the colors better-- for example, the rectangle above the golden one is a spectacular deep blue-green, but it looks black, no matter how I photograph it.

"Come Undone"

The main color in this piece is copper, but it looks gold in photos. Abstract with heavy black shapes. My lovely friend gifted me with a box of her scraps from Bullseye Glass classes, and we magpied some from the BEG building, after the class we took together in December. 

The jumping off point was the milky glass with green iridescent and pink through out, and black lines. Bits of vintage jewelry, bus shelter glass, milk glass,  beads, buttons. A really great cross with green/red/amber rhinestones weights the bottom/side. This collage brings back music from the 80s for me, both the culture's experience, and my own personal favorites. On wood. 12" x 12", like an LP.

detail:

Geometry.

Simple intensity: Textured red and orange glass scraps from Bullseye Glass on gold pigment treated  distressed found wood.

from a new series in a new direction. I am not sure I should even have posted it, but I've been up all night working on art, and this one was ready to be photographed.

I should take another photo. The pigment and acrylic gel have reacted and made an interesting blue aura around the glass, which you can see the beginnings of in this photo. It's more obvious and gives the piece really great depth.

Red Knight

Red, Red, Red. (and gold!)

glass, plastic, gold and silver foil on found wood/ 12 x 12"

The Dancers

Been working the single primary color nerve. Cobalt blue, pieces of plastic, bottles, stained glass scraps, cabochons, gilded with silver foil. On wood with silver gilded bus shelter glass. Painted with heavy acrylic gel medium, several shades of silver pigment. 12" x 12"

Another Girl, Another Planet

The Only Ones's version, yes, even over The Replacements.

Found glass pieces, mostly backed in silver foil, a bit of gold. Celestial harmony or Caulder/Miro rip off. I like it. Few metal pieces. Atomic. Futurepast on purpose. 10 x 20"

waltz #2

Inspired by the thick, lush black line work of comic books and their predecessors, woodcuts, I've attempted that saturated line with pieces of black broken glass, set, cube by cube to highlight, define and give a boldness to the disparate  pieces: cocktail glass, windshield glass, and fluted pieces from a frilly serving dish. Glass gilded in silver or gold foil. Clear glass tubes are backed with gold foil, on gold leafed panel painted with oxblood latex paint.

close up of centre

In progress

PDX Tree (RIP)

Tree. (I've changed Dates so this appears later in the timeline).

Update: This piece has become most poignant to me. The house next to mine is being torn down to build a concrete monstrosity. That, alone, is sad. What is heartbreaking? Losing 2 100+ year old trees and an ancient Camellia.  Seriously tragic. I found out that the builder had only to pay 2400 dollars to chop them down. I am sure they will sell of slices of the trunks and recoup their cost, so the people who rent the concrete monstrosities can use them as coffee tables.

Copper gilded clear glass trunk, abstract pieces of green glass, scraps from stained glass, scraps of stained glass wreaths, buttons, beads form the leaves. Background of antiqued paint, gold pigment. Clear stained glass scraps backed in silver and gold complete. More representational than anything I've done in some time.
I love the composition. On found wood. The violet under-painting is not visible in person. 11 x 45"
In memory of all the lovely trees on SE Division being felled to make way for densely packed apartments.

box in progress--remembering living in Hawaii

I am really very excited about this piece. In my trove of collected found objects I found: a broken child's jade bracelet, found in the gutter on the corner of Nuuanu and Beretania in Honolulu. A shell from Molokai with embedded sand, giving the appearance of bared teeth. A spiral unicorn shell from the green sand beach on the Kona side of the Big Island. Sea glass from the little hidden beach on Oahu I called, ever so cleverly, "sea glass beach", because there was SO much of it. It was tiny, and surrounded by tall rocks. Likely it was a favorite drinking spot, with the bottles being smashed and rolled to smooth, nearly opaque surfaces. One could just scoop up large hand fulls. I wonder if it is still there.

Put together with silver gilded windshield glass in blue, seed, round, oblong, rice, and baroque pearls (Mikimoto end-shanks I received in trade from a friend who did time in the Garment District in NYC),
broken mirror pieces, and a few silver gilded clear glass pieces. In a wooden cigar box, currently painted with antique gold paint.

I have the front of the box planned in my head, but am still toying with whether to use the antique patina paint on this piece or not. Leaning towards yes.

I loved living in Hawaii, but I missed my friends and family, both of origin and of choice and went back to the mainland.

Architecture, Future Past

Center is black iron fence piece.
Tracing around with pearl, freshwater and vintage
silver gilded blue windshield glass
opaque glass
gold gilded clear glass
gold pigment
silver pigment
variegated foil
antiquing paint
on found wood in building-ish shape
Exploring the materials of the past surrounded by layers of years, additions, subtractions, embellishments.
The things we throw away reclaimed and elevated, celebrating the sensuous shape of the fence with sediment of shiny things.

this is about 8 x 24"

In vinos myseria

"Candy Says"

Asymmetrical wood with cameo, broken jewelry, beads, buttons, ephemera. Glass from cocktail glasses, bus shelters, stained glass scraps, cars, windows, bottles. Bring the disparate elements of the cast offs of a city into a cohesive other. Elevating the mundane with gold and silver foil, gold, silver and copper pigment. The yellow is the wall of my studio behind. So many pieces making an intricate, mindful collage.

I really like the silver radiant lines, and the skull bead, which I found in the gutter near my workplace.

 For some damned reason,  I cannot get this image to post right side up, even if I save it upside down. ah well, dig that crazy detail!

Shining

small fetish boxes with glass items: a glass skull I dug up in SE industrial Portland, under the Hawthorne bridge, gilded in silver in a box lined in '30s silk velvet and a squirrel mandible w/gold pigment painted heart in a simple black box. I posted them a few years back, and I will dig out the ones I never photographed, because they make a great series.

For awhile, I had this set of unpainted pine dolls. They were spooky on their own, but I recalled the antiqued metal angels in cemeteries, and painted them. In a simple black box with gold hinges attached.

I am beginning to branch away from 2-d glass only art more aggressively, but my heart is, as Blondie said, of glass.

"I'm So Glad That You're Gone" (squirrel bones/glass heart in box) 

Hawthorne Skull (skull gilded with silver in velvet lined box)

The Shining: wooden dolls, treated with patina, in black box. 

Mardi Gras

New box piece. The reaction to my use of orange in an earlier piece lead me to try the same colors in a cigar box, with Mardi Gras on the mind. Lots of found jewelry/beads/buttons give it the controlled chaos I enjoy so very much.