About Glass Beads

I thought I would talk about a medium I have been working in for twenty years which is lampworked glass beads. I am in a new book published by Lark Books called “Masters: Glass Beads” that has bios and photos of 40 bead makers, and their beads, who have a long history of making fine lampworked glass beads. This publication will be out in May and can be pre-ordered through Amazon.com.

I have had a 20 year obsession with glass bead lampworking and consider it time well spent. For those who do not know, making glass beads in a torch is both hypnotic and addictive. It is such an absorbing process that it makes everything outside of the glass in the flame go away. It is so absorbing that I have to have a clock right in front of me when I work, so that I do not work for too many hours in a row.

Making glass beads came about organically for me after a friend of mine brought some Italian glass rods to me over 25 years ago. I couldn’t find anyone who could or would teach me to make beads, so I figured it out on my own by looking at photos of very old Italian glass beads.

As time went on, I got really heavy into a crystal coated glass called dichroic, which is very bright and sparkles a lot. Dichroic glass is a really weird thing to work with because your are dealing with bent light like with the rainbow produced by a prism and not a pigment. I have included a photo of a group of dichroic beads that I really like because the colors turned out so rich that I almost want to eat them.

From Photo to Art Image

I’m really tired tonight, but I did manage to get a project finished from the frost photo that I posted yesterday. I have so much fun when I get into the groove with an art project in Photoshop. In fact, I find it hard to stop and play a computer game or surf the web.

In spite of all my talk about loving to use Photoshop, I still like working directly in a number of mediums like paint, felt-tip pens, oil pastels, pencils, clay and even hot glass. If I get lucky, something comes out to where I can scan what I made in another medium and then make it into something else on the computer – double the fun!

Check out the frost image I have posted.

Where Inspiration Comes From

I was watching my cats watch a vibrating cat toy dance across my wooden floor and thought – Wow isn’t this fun! But it got me thinking about where inspiration for creative projects comes from. As I mused upon this subject, I was reminded of a photo of my frosted car windshield that I took one morning in the freezing cold last month. It was one of those inspired photo moments and it produced some very nice images of the magic of frozen water crystals. I am currently using one of these frost photos as the starting point for one of my next projects.

My point being, that inspiration can come from anywhere at anytime when you least expect it and I find that to be a wonderful thing. Grabbing those inspirational moments is one of the reasons I started taking photos when ever I saw something that peaked my interest, whether it is a rusty piece of pipe or a beautiful sky full of clouds.

Speaking of photos, I love my digital cameras and the Photoshop software to work on them with. I first learned photography with a 35mm camera and though it was possible to get good photos, it is a lot easier to interact with my digital images. I got myself a nice little portal scanner and scanned all my 35mm images into my computer to add to my image library.

Another thing I like to do is request photos from other people when they go on trips to places I have never been and might never go to. This allows me to see the world through someone else’s eyes and I get some surprising results, making it worth while to be a bit of a pest to get photos from these other people.

Be sure to check my next post for the finished image made from the frost photo that I mentioned above.

* “I am but the shadow of a mouse on the surface of the second moon” *

Art and the Artist

I have been an artist for as long as I can remember and I have written articles for magazines about art, but this is the first time I have put forth my personal musings about art and the creative process as I experience it.

I have expressed my creative urges in many different mediums, but for the past couple of years, I have focused on learning to use computer software to create images that can be used in many different ways. I never thought I would enjoy working on a computer to create art, but as I finally developed a broad enough skill set in Photoshop, I found that it was so much fun and empowering. I use to do graphic art in the early 70's and at that point in time, it was really hard because none of the software programs that we take for granted these days even existed and it was all done by cut and paste - really time consuming stuff!

Today I am posting one of my latest attempts of a self portrait called "The Density of Smoke - A self portrait in Sepia", where the pattern in the background is a recreation of an algorithm for the density of smoke. I feel that the algorithm is so neat looking that I had to use it somewhere in my portrait because I sometimes feel like I have the physical density of smoke.

I am fascinated at how the algorithm for the density of smoke insinuated itself into my self portrait. I read constantly and I see thousands of words and images, but this one algorithm jumped out at me and caused me to want to inhabit the same space as it, in what ever manner I could.