Mermaid box

I made this recently. It is about 8" X 4", scraped the velvet off the top of it and used windshield glass and sea items.

Water

I started this whole gilded glass collagescape thing I do because I liked the way blue windshield glass glittered in the gutters of inner SE industrial Portland. (Now, it is all clean and Starbucks laden, so no more glass!) I was thinking about how, exactly, one would create the shine in a piece of art, and I lost a rhinestone from a button, saw the foil on the back, and my process was born. Well, first I had to deal with the trials and tribulations of learning to gild tiny little pieces of glass.

I like the blue glass very much, as when gilded with silver, it has the appearance of water. These two pieces are my attempt at capturing the serenity of backyard koi and lily ponds, like Phil's in Pendleton. The fish are made of thicker glass, gilded in copper, and the water has mirror thrown in for light and movement. The water lily pads are made of beer bottle glass, and the flowers are gold pigment painted clear glass.

Ponds are 24" X 36", gilded glass on wood.

A different kind of flower

An abstract orchid. The yellow glass is from a building in Pendleton, Oregon (no, I didn't break it, I never obtain my materials illegally), the thicker white glass is Trimet bus shelter glass, and I am not sure where the other random pieces come back.

This is one of the pieces that made me jump back and kiss myself when I created it.

12" X 12" gilded glass on wood

The Secret Garden

This was one of the best pieces I've ever done. 24 7" X 7" panels conceived to be a whole piece from the beginning. I showed this at the Pendleton Arts Center and at NAAU. This ended up in the private collection of painter James Lavadour. JL doesn't trade, so it was a big deal.

More of new flowers series

I've worked with flowers in the past, and will post photos of what those pieces looked like for comparison later this week. The new pieces feel more like candid photos, where as the older work looked like staged portraits. The new stuff is more organic, and not only because I am using various pieces of wood as the stems. There is more than one type of flower on each piece, I am no longer pathologically afraid of negative space, and I am making work purely to make myself squeal with delight.

This particular one is charming to me. The flowers are constructed from beads, broken pieces of vintage jewelry, windshield glass, sea glass and a broken beer bottle make up the leaves. Lately, I've been fascinated with things of all white, thus, the all white pearl flower. I am always happy when I create a flower that looks probable but does not exist in nature. I really dig the red sticks; I don't remember where I found those.

This is 7" X 7". Like a record, baby.

This is for my art

This is the new stuff I am working on. More refined flowers and utilizing branches from trees I pick up when wandering around the neighborhood.