Hang around with creative people

I've had the glass rings and most of the copper pieces in this mobile sitting on separate shelves in my studio for three years. Every few months I would pick up the rings and chastise myself for never finishing it. Fast forward to two days ago when I was at a garden meeting talking with several friends who all do creative work or hobbies—sculpture, glass, painting, and garden design, and I mentioned to a new friend who is multi-talented that I was getting back into glass and metal work. The next day I was in the middle of working on my current painting when I suddenly started seeing mental images of the rings and some of the copper finally assembled into a mobile. After the third one I stopped trying to paint and pulled out all the elements and started arranging them in different ways, and Shazam! I have a new mobile! (And it feels so good to finally finish it!)

A spot of color

Real Cool Blue

I wanted to share this photo a friend of mine just sent me. She got a fused glass hanging ornament a couple years ago and said she was really enjoying having that spot of color in her back yard this winter, especially after this snowfall.

I know exactly what she means because except for my early hellebores, some primroses I just bought, and my witchazels, my glass pieces are the only color in my garden right now. I'm loving all the rain we're getting—that's one of the reasons I moved to the Northwest—especially since the trees really need it, but my garden does look pretty dreary.

I'm cutting a lot of glass for ornaments this week, and as soon as the weather calms down a little, I'll start firing pieces (we've had a lot of little power outages with all the wind). I'm getting a body of work together for this year's Spring Garden Fair, the first weekend in May, at the County Fairgrounds in Canby. It will just be glass art for the garden, no paintings. I just drove down to Bullseye this morning to get more glass. It's time-consuming cutting it, so it's a good way to spend cold, windy, winter days, and plus, having a pile of brilliant iridescent color in front of me is always a treat. I'm such a color junkie.

Cheers!

New toys, new joys

Garden mobile

I'm branching out in two more dimensions —depth and time. I've been thinking about going into mobiles for about a year. I was wanting to make big ones for the garden, out of the filbert wood I harvested 3 or 4 years ago. But as a first step, to get used to thinking about shape and motion, I decided to go small and make little ones, with some bits of glass in them. This is my third one. The first one is going to get redone, and the second one was pretty good and went to a friend. It's fun to play with making different shapes, and I have many more ideas to play with.

Unfortunately it's a bit hard on my hands and wrists, but I'm constantly trying to find ways to make it easier to bend the large wire. I bought a few new pairs of pliers specifically for bending, and they help a  lot to give me the leverage I need. But I still can't do it every day, which is fine. Plenty of other stuff to do.

Next weekend I'll be showing and selling my artwork, including this mobile, at the open garden of my friend Meredith, both Saturday and Sunday. And I'll be doing the Art In the Garden fair at Laurel Hedge in Estacada the last Saturday in August. It's looking like nice weather for next weekend.

New glass for the Beavercreek Craft Fair

Another art and craft fair this Saturday, right here in beautiful downtown Beavercreek! I've been cooking glass for the last two weeks and have ten new pieces to show. Since I found out this summer how great the paler colors look in shady areas and even inside a room out of direct light, I've been wanting to make more pieces in these delicate tones. This took me a long time to figure out because I'm naturally drawn to the deeper, richer colors, but in a shady garden like mine, they just don't show up nearly as well as the lighter colors. So I have a bunch of new ones—like this one:

I've also been wanting to work out some shapes like my big radiant stars, but in a smaller, less pricey size. I think this 5" one has possibilities. I'll see how it does this weekend:

The BCT craft fair this Saturday is at Beavercreek Elementary out on South Beavercreek Road, and they're going to have over 100 vendors! That seems HUGE to me. I'll have my glass and greeting cards towards the back of the room where Santa will be posing for photos. I'll have cards of many of my paintings, and also of photos that I've taken around Oregon.

I've signed up for another local craft fair the first Saturday in December, at the Lions' Club Craft Fair. It'll be just south of Oregon City on Hwy 213. It's a lot smaller than the BCT fair, around 40 vendors, and it should be fun too. Both shows are from 10am to 4pm. I'd love to see you there!

New colors, new big designs!

I finally stopped making glass for the Art In The Garden show this Saturday, and got pictures of them all today. The wind wiggled them a little but wasn't a big problem.

First, my favorite new color combinations...

Cranberry and greens

Shades of blue, aqua, and plum

Four or five shades of green

Cranberry, orange, and gold

I also started playing with larger designs, to fill up my new kiln. These are a bit over 6" across. First I tried using 1/2" strips...

Deep cobalt and aqua

Deep cranberry with grape streaks

Then I started seeing what I could do with the thinnest strips I could cut, almost down to 1/4". It took a couple tries and I had to change my firing program to get good solid joins, but I finally got what I was shooting for...

Aqua, lime green, and 2 shades of pale blue

Orange streaky glass with rich yellow.

These new radiant stars take a lot longer to cut and I used up a lot more bandaids, but I love the look. I also worked with pale tints of glass for the first time, and found that the paler pieces work really well in dim light situations, either very shady outside, against dark backgrounds, or even inside a dimly lit room. The pale tints, which would wash out in bright light, show up wonderfully in shade or shadow.

I'll have all these pieces and more at Estacada on Saturday, from 10am to 4pm. I'll also have a selection of prints and paintings and photo cards.

I hope to see you there!

Art in the Garden is coming!

The Art In The Garden show and sale is coming to Laurel Hedge Gardens again! The last Saturday in August a wide variety of garden and fine art and artists will be at this wonderful display garden a couple miles north of Estacada. This is a great excuse to come see some great art in one of the most beautiful gardens in Clackamas county. There are about two acres of all kinds of settings—oriental, contemporary, English, and ponds—with beautifully built structures, bits of whimsy and notes of elegance, great views of the surrounding hills, and a layout like a Disneyland for gardeners. They have a great shop with hundreds of reasonably-priced antiques and accents for house and garden, and a selection of unusual and hard-to-find plants that you can see right there in the gardens. Besides being amazing designers, the proprietors are committed plantsmen and very experienced with gardening here in the land of Crispy-Like-An-Oven vs. Where's-That-Summer-You-Promised?. Everywhere you look you'll see something beautiful, and every bit of it makes you feel right at home. Even without the art it's well worth the drive to Estacada just to spend a couple hours in the midst of all that beauty. And all that and wine-tasting, too! Hip Chicks do Wine are great!

I'm cooking up glass as fast as I can, trying out different color combinations and new designs, including several larger pieces from my new kiln. I'm going to take some paintings, but mostly it'll be glass, glass, and more glass! I've got a dozen pieces now and I hope to have at least two dozen at the show. I'll post pictures of some of them soon.

For more information on the show, including pictures from last year's event, follow the link to Laurel Hedge in my links section.

A new kiln!

I got a new kiln! I ordered an Evenheat Studio Pro STP with an automated controller and an 8"x8" chamber. My old kiln is an Evenheat and I felt very comfortable buying a new one. Plus I got a great price on it from Fusion Headquarters in Newberg. It's really different having a controller so I can actually follow recommended firing schedules with the required precise control of temperatures for multi-layered full fusing. To start with I had to do a few experimental firings to figure out the schedule for the type of pieces I've been doing, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to make one bigger than I've been able to do before.

I made a big 2-layer ring of mixed opal and transparent glass scraps, 6 inches across. It came out pretty good, not far from what I expected, and is now hanging in the garden.

Once I got the firing schedule figured out, I started doing multiple pieces at once, and that worked great too. I've been really happy to see how consistent and repeatable the kiln operation is. Now I can start doing different types of pieces, lots of things that would have been completely impossible in my old kiln, now that I've got that controller.

One of my multiple firings, I did 3 pieces using the same color scheme of shades of green with amber, browns, and touches of cranberry. I had been previously siezed with this compulsion to add metal bells to some of the glass pieces, so the short icon that came out of this firing got belled:

It has found a home hanging off my front porch, where one late afternoon sunbeam has been coming through the trees and lighting up the lime green and cranberry, during afternoon sunbreaks. The bell's only going to ring if the wind hits about 40mph, but I love the warm shine of the tin, and I do love combining the metal with the glass.

I also went on a blue binge, layering a cold light cobalt blue on top of a warmer medium blue—I call it pthalo—it's as close to a summer blue sky morning as I can get.

I had been looking at my garden before the first leaves appeared and thought a lot about how I can add interest to my winter garden, and I decided that some more complex installations would go a long way toward giving me the visual treats I crave during those bare months. The first idea I came up with was to fire single-color rectangles and hang them between the rails of the wood fence between the house and the barn, where they'll catch the morning sun when it's out. The first pass of six pieces took me two firings, and I decided to hang transparent cranberry, orange, and yellow pieces on each side of the gate.

This is how it looks facing the house in the afternoon light. The orange is the only color that shows up brightly unless you're quite close to it. I'm thinking of putting some lime green pieces next to these. I'm also wondering how opal glass will work, if it's fairly light. It'll show up better against the dark barn and shadows than most of the transparent will. But every now and then from the house, when the sun's in just the right place, I can see all three colors, and it's a nice surprise. As the season goes on, they'll mostly become obscured by the foliage of the hydrangea, dogwood, and grapes planted on the fence. But when the leaves drop in November, they'll be back with their bright colors to light up my winter and spring mornings.

Trying to picture glass

I never thought of myself as a fan of red or gold, but this is now one of my favorite color combinations—for the glass, at least. I took this photo with the flash against a white background and then photoshopped the background to black, so it's something of a false effect—you'd barely be able to see any of it on against black.

I've been trying to find a way to get better photos of the glass pieces that show off the colors even in a small size, such as the thumbnails that are used on Etsy. The shots of the pieces outside against my trees are what they really look like outside, but depending how much light there is that day, different colors show up better and the piece can look quite variable. Like this one:

Plus, I would like to have a setup for shooting them inside the house, on the days when it's just too cold and foul outside. I can shoot if it's just drizzling, but when there's ice on the patio or the piece is whipping around in the wind, it's really more than I can cope with.

So I tried photographing some against a white background with lights on it to provide a little backlighting.

But although this shows the true colors of the glass, the problem is that the pieces never actually look like this, except in the photo.

When I added the flash, it makes it more as it actually appears, because you almost always see the light reflecting off the front as well as that coming through the glass. And the colors against the plain white background do show up better, even in small images. The hot spots from the flash reflections are a problem, and would never do for real commercial photos, but I can live with them. So I guess I just need to use multiple photos. I'll probably skip the photoshopping—that's just for fun.

Finally, some decent gardening days!

Not all my camellias made it through the winter (or the freezing temps two weeks ago) with their buds intact, so maybe this one is going all out to make up for that. This is an unnamed seedling I bought at Al's five years ago—it was the first camellia I planted here. It has semi-double red and white variegated flowers, and has been growing steadily every since I planted it—unfortunately too close to a main pathway. What was I thinking? I've been trying to figure out how to move it without seriously upsetting it, and I think I've finally found out how. I considered shaping it back, but it has a lovely loose form and as you can see, is certainly bloom-silly some years. So this year will be the year of the move. I was out yesterday afternoon weeding, and looked up and saw the late sun hitting the top of it, and all those beautiful flowers, and had to take a picture of this display. This is why I love camellias, and why I grow them. Mmmmm.

Yesterday morning while it was too cold to go outside I cooked up a new glass piece. I've done two of these diamonds, but this is the first one I'd call successful.

Medium turquoise blue, a bit of lime green, and some intense lemon yellow. Seems like a nice bright color combination, one that might show up well among the greens of the garden. I like how the shape turned out—almost straight on the edges.

So, a great day—glass, murdering weeds, and fifty red & white camellias!

Ice Rainbow Garden Jewelry in two beautiful nearby gardens

If you live near Estacada or Wilsonville, you can now see my glass pieces hanging in two beautiful gardens. Matthew and Darin of Laurel Hedge are garden designers who sell antiques and art pieces as well as select plants at their shop and gardens just NE of Estacada on Currin Road. They are open every Saturday now through mid-October, or by appointment. Hughes Water Garden is on Stafford Road south of I-205 just NE of Wilsonville. They have a wide selection of water plants and hardy plants and garden and pond art of all kinds, and are open most days through September. Both places are truly inspiring places to visit if you're looking for ideas for plantings or designs. Links to both photo-filled websites are in the sidebar.

My sap must be rising

It stopped raining (after 2.6") and I can't stay inside—I keep making little trips out in the garden. I've checked all the hellebores again, pulled a bunch of windthrown branches off of them, and glared menacingly at some weeds. Big fat buds are starting to open. I looked out back this morning before the rain stopped and saw both my witch hazels are blooming—yay! It seems like they're a little bit earlier this year, but I didn't write it down last year so I'm just guessing. Hooray, color in the garden! Daffodil tips have broken ground—and that's pretty much it for now. So I should be able to sit still, but I can't! I tried a little painting work, then the sun came out and I had to get out in that. We're supposed to get two dry days starting day after tomorrow, I'll be out there weeding if it's not too cold, windy, or smoky.

And tomorrow I'm going for the first plant-shopping trip of the year with three other plant addicts—maybe that's why I can't concentrate! I'm frapturous.

 Ring Thing

Yesterday while it rained I finished putting together my first larger glass piece for my garden. If you look very closely at this photo you can see a thin rectangular wrought iron frame, with four fused glass rings tied into it with copper wire. While the sun was peeping intermittently through the selfish clouds this afternoon, I walked all over the garden with it, looking for a relatively uncluttered place to photograph it, maybe with a bit of sunshine on it if any could get through. Turns out I have no nice uncluttered backgrounds, just my dark green house and dark brown barn, but I did figure out where I want to put the Ring Thing—at the front entrance to my future meditation garden, which will materialize a year or two from now.

I actually got a really nice feeling of satisfaction when I finished putting the piece together. It's the first time I've ever assembled anything like that, and that feeling made me eager to do another one. It might be time to start pulling out pieces of the filbert wood I put away last fall, and see what it will take to put something together that will hold some glass. That will be more work than just repurposing another candle stand, but it could be a logical progression. I know one thing—I want the next one to be taller, so it's easier to see against the sky.

Oh, My Stars!

A new shape is coming out of the kiln—8 point stars. I finally solved the riddle of how to put one together, and found I can make a nice little 4-plus inch star. There should be lots of great color combos possible, even though they're a bit constrained by the desire for symmetry. In the first one I wanted to try and combine lime green and cranberry. That turned out a bit harsh and unsatisfying, but the addition of a few contrasting colors—aqua and pale gold—blended them together in a way I really like.

I ended up having to fire this one twice, because two of the pieces crawled apart as they melted instead of joining together. Oh well. I would just as soon learn all my lessons now before I move on to bigger, more complicated pieces.

I tried a second star on Christmas Eve, in a mix of reds and ambers that has become one of my favorite color combos.

Everybody stayed put this time, and I loved the way it turned out. I love the small irregularities in shape from the varied shapes of the chips, the subtle color changes from the overlapping hues, and the way they look like melting, colored ice. The light reflections off of every rounded edge and the perfect smoothness of the glass makes them really fun to touch, too. I'm beginning to have thoughts of the possibilities of three dimensional texture I might have with even this simple layering process.

Fun fun fun!

There's a Full Moon Out—Do Your Full Moon Dance!

This time of year, it's all about the weather for me. I'm a compulsive radar-map and thermometer watcher. I just saw that there was a small radar blob on top of my house and I went to the back door to see if it was indeed sprinkling outside—but the sky looked clear and a big full moon is shining brightly, rising behind the tall firs. I will never figure out the weather in Oregon. One of my favorite days was a few years ago, I don't remember if it was late spring or early fall, but all day long from the time I woke up, thick dark clouds rolled overhead from the southwest. Hour after hour it looked like it could rain buckets at any moment, but by mid-afternoon, it was still dry, just wind and clouds. Then while I watched through my living room window, the clouds began to break and quickly they shrank and disappeared, and the brilliant sun came shining beautifully from the west as it headed toward the coast. And that was when it started raining, with no clouds overhead—a soft, steady, light rain that kept falling for a quarter hour. All I could do was laugh in wonder.

I actually went out and dug up a half dozen weeds—well, Labrador violets—this afternoon, out of the mud, it was so nice. Cold, but nice. I think the garden is all ready for the impending freezing nights. I'm sure my geraniums and begonias are going to bite the big one, but that's the circle of Life. The begonia tubers will sleep all winter in my garage, and I'll be ready to buy more baby geraniums next spring. I planted the two new hardy sedums I just bought from Anthony and Susan of Green Gate Nursery in Willamette (old West Linn). It's tough being a plant junkie. You try and try to resist them, but then you get close to one you've never seen before, and it's soooo cute, and then you hear the words, "It's so easy to grow..." and you're sunk.

But the winter weather is here, and it's time to take all that digging energy and put it to work in my studio. My little glass fusing kiln has been helping keep my garage warm, as piece after piece has been coming out. I've been having several thoughts of new designs, some fairly easy and some I'm not ready to try yet.

I wasn't just happy that I finally got a good-looking 8-ray star form, using a square center, I fell in love with the color combination of the amber-gold with the cranberry red. With the orange accents, it looks like a sunset.

I had to try another one, with another color combination I hadn't used for years—lime green opal (translucent) glass with deep turquoise transparent:

Of course I had to add a few more colors, medium and lime green, and green iridescent. The pieces stayed almost square to each other, and I was so excited when I opened the kiln I did my little happy kiln dance.

You can dance if you want to! You can leave your cares behind! And in winter when it's 55 in your garage, it'll help you keep warm!

Happy freezing!

Growing for growing's sake

I found a tiny miracle in my house this morning when I got up. This summer a friend gave me some prunings from one of my favorite shrubs of hers, an unknown variety of Pieris that has bright pink new growth every winter. I potted up several cuttings from it and they've been living under lights inside my house, along with a hydrangea cutting from my flowers-bigger-than-my-head plant. Although none of them  have died, they hadn't shown any signs of growth either—until this morning. One of them has a tiny new branch with several miniscule leaves on it. Sure hope it keeps growing till spring, when I'll be able to put it out in the garden.

A couple days ago I did a piece that reminded me of one of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series—the blue and green colors and the blockiness of it. Usually the shapes of the pieces don’t add that much to the overall look of the piece, but in this one the color shapes combined to make a real composition. Looking at his work again reminds me of where I got lost in my painting, when it seemed like I stopped getting what I wanted, and I realize that never happened—I just kept changing what I wanted. Learning to paint what’s inside you is exploring the unknown, and exploring the unknown is like going up a staircase and thinking every step is the summit. You spend time at each one, examining every bit of it in detail so you can translate it into your experience.  You paint it this way and that until it’s yours, all yours, and suddenly you realize—it’s not the top, it’s not where you’re trying to get to—it’s just another step. You start looking around for the rest of the staircase, the next step. You come upon something that clicks with you—it might be anything—something that stirs you, that makes you want to run and grab your paints and start working again.

Looking at Diebenkorn's work on the web made me feel that way—that I wanted to grab my paints—but I didn't, I made more glass instead.

I made a peppery color scheme, for a fellow gardener, that looks good enough to eat in the sun.

And then I made one that looks rather unfortunately like a really old piece of pizza. It will go to a lonely, dark corner of my garden where no one will ever notice it. I hope. Or maybe I'll bury it, so a hundred years from now a future resident can dig it up, and go "Ewwwww!"

Yesterday I attended a memorial service for a member of our local Hardy Plant group, a wonderful woman whom I clearly did not get to know well enough. The pastor who officiated said something at the end that touched me. "If you want to honor Ann, take a little bit of whatever she gave you, and pass it on to someone else."That is a way of growing that I hadn't thought of—growing a memory into an act of friendship, growing a previous relationship into a future one. By passing on even the tiniest gift, you multiply it far beyond its original size.

Getting a lesson in ZING

If you're already sick of my garden photos, might as well turn away or grab a baggie...it's a new week and new colors are out. And miracle of miracles, 3 sunny days in a row to enjoy them! Hooray!

My 'Hilleri' Japanese maple is hitting its stride now. You don't usually notice this unless you're right down in the northeast area I call my grotto, but this time of year you can't miss it from the house, even.
It's a very nice little tree with dark green leaves 50 weeks out of the year. Then for a week it slowly shifts to dark burgundy, then dark brick red, and then--POW!

I mentioned before that my Satomi always turns orange red. This year it got more sun than every before, I wonder if it'll go brighter next week?

This was the second 'Forest Pansy' redbud I got, and it gets more sun than the first one, but usually it just goes yellow gold and then immediately sheds. This year it has a lot more red in it than I've ever seen. I wonder if it might be in love?

That's it, except for my 'Bloodgood' Japanese maples and my Cotinus 'Royal Purple', which haven't even started thinking about changing yet. But I do have some new glass pieces. I wanted to try a mixed fusing of opal glass (mostly opaque) on the bottom and colored transparent cathedral glass on top. I think they'll work better than just the transparent in areas where the light may not hit them directly, or there may be a dark area behind them like a dark wall or thick greenery, but the opal still lights up when the sun hits it from behind. It's a different effect, and I like it.

I had taken my last load of pieces down to the Howden Gallery on Tuesday, and my studio looked really empty except for a few "seconds" that exhibited one or more glaring defects or a general lack of appeal. It's good to have some bright stuff back hanging around, at least for a while. I fired my 23rd piece last night. The two below I really cranked out quickly, but now as I'm seeing how they turned out I'm seeing there are a lot of possibilities in mixing the two styles of glass. I'm realizing that each piece really is a painting on its own, and worth spending the time to play with. I noticed on a couple of the recent pieces that I may have all the colors I want in a piece and it still won't look "together", or have that particular—well, hook—that grabs your eye. I would think I was done putting the chips together, but still be wanting to play with it. I'd rearrange a couple pieces a little, or replace one or two with slightly different colors, and suddenly there's a ZING! in my gut, and I knew it had gone to a new level. I look back at all the paintings I've done and finished, and know that sadly, there were a lot of them that didn't have a ZING. ZINGless. I'm thinking this is a good thing to know, when you have ZING vs. when there is no ZING. Some ZING is definitely better than no ZING.

I must have a new brain cell or two (I was SO happy to read that adults can still grow them after all), because I've been realizing a lot of things just lately. One was that I need to add a link to Shari Erickson's webpage. If you've never seen her miniatures, they really are rather jaw-dropping.

Will work for FUN!

I went into the studio yesterday evening hungry for some colors, so I grabbed glass and cut up some blues, greens and browns, cleaned them and dumped them onto a sheet of paper. I looked at the pile and a light went off in my head. When I first started fusing I had had an idea of making an openwork piece, with gaps between the individual pieces. I'd made a couple tries at it but they hadn't looked good enough to fire. Now there was one sitting in front of me. With a little bit of rearranging, they turned into what I took out of my kiln this morning:

If you half-close your eyes, you can see my back yard in here!

I noticed with one of the other pieces I blogged about yesterday that it was the culmination of another idea that I had to iterate on several times before I got one that was recognizable as my original idea. Several other of the pieces that led up to it were interesting in themselves, just not what I had been aiming for. But they spun off other ideas to try to develop. That got me thinking about how often that had happened in my painting where I would have an idea of an image and work it up into a painting, only to have the result not really embody what I had imagined to begin with. But the paintings took so long that I would always figure that it was as close as I would be able to get, and rather than keep working on that idea I would go off in a new direction.

That reminded me very much of watching Pablo Picasso working in the excellent video I believe I have written about before, The Mystery Of Picasso. He reworked everything in the video as he painted it, constantly changing and revamping, wiping out and repainting a dozen times, or painting over, or throwing out and starting all over. I wonder if that was the issue with him, that he was trying to get closer to his starting idea. It might not be. Robert Burridge, if you've ever watched any of his videos (and if you have not, I recommend them highly) seems to pull stuff out of his hat as he goes, with or without an an actual beginning idea. He'll start with a thread of an idea, or hint of a thread of an idea.

I was taking some of these pieces down to Howden Gallery this morning, where they are now for sale, priced from $15 to $30, and started thinking about what I would answer if someone asked me, "Now that you're doing glass, are you going to keep painting?" I wasn't sure what the correct answer would be, but on the way back home I was thinking about the glass colors, and got an idea for another ink painting that I'll be doing soon. So, I guess Art feeds Art, and ideas come from everything you do! Or as Robert Burridge says, "No matter what the question is, the answer is always 'YES!'"

Passion takes a hand

A 1.5"x5" piece with both transparent and opal glass in garden colors—

blues, lots of greens, and a bit of pink and red.

One of my first rings, also a mix of transparent and opal glass.

A shot of warm color, like orange juice on a cold morning.

I've been having so much fun fusing. I just finished my 14th firing, a different style piece composed of overlapped small rectangles filling in a circular shape. It has to cool in the kiln for 6 more hours, so I won't see it till tomorrow morning—I'm not staying up till 2am! I've tried a couple different shapes and more new color combinations. Yesterday I spent a while making wire loops for them and monofilament hangers, and today, for the first time, I took the two pieces above outside and hung them on a garden pole in between rain showers. I love looking at them outside. The spots of bright color against the cloudy skies and the dark trees are really welcome additions to my garden. I want more out there, more pieces, and larger and more complex. I'm thinking of the single pieces as Garden Jewelry, for poor leafless trees that have to stand there naked all winter. But I have fences too, that can be decorated, and more garden poles, eaves, and low-hanging fir branches that can use some decoration too. The rings have the lovely habit of rotating slowly in the breeze, so the colors change a bit as the light hits from different angles.

Here are a few more pieces:

One of my friends said this one reminds her of that formica countertop

that came out in the 1950's that had little orange and turquoise boomerangs all over it.

A couple of the orange rectangles surprised me by turning dark red during the firing.

I thought that maybe from a distance, the clear might disappear and the blue pieces would look like they were floating in air.

The warmth of earth tones, the forest in summer.

When I was doing a firing a couple days ago, I had a really interesting moment. I was thinking about how playing with the glass was giving me an opportunity to reduce my work from painting to the two simplest and most important elements I had craved in my painting—color and shape. Creating good paintings requires so many more things, unless you go to color fields, which I came close to in my last ink painting. But with these small glass pieces, color and shape are all I'm working with. And as I thought that, it was as if a window opened in my side and I could see and feel a place in my core that didn't want to do anything but make colors and shapes, and it wanted to make piece after piece. No doubt, no thoughts, no emotion even, just this fierce drive—to work, to make, to do this one thing. I've felt the effects of that desire to create before, but I had never seen that core impulse in myself,  completely intense and unyielding, as an instinct might be.

So now I know what's making me do this. It's hard-wired into me.