Stained Glass – Toronto, Canada. 2012 ©
I have friends that are glassblowers and stained glass artists and I love to watch them work with this amazing material. At one point it is a liquid and then later as hard as a rock, but yet as fragile as a butterfly’s wing. Glass is a wonderful material to work with…if you know what you are doing. Well I don’t. Many years ago I tried to blow glass at my friend Brian Ashby’s studio, but could not manage even a bad result…but I can design and love sitting in a church observing the work by those that make magic with lead and panes of coloured glass. So a few years ago, reading a book on the Catalan artist Antonio Tapies, I came across his work for a Capuchin Monastery of Sion in Switzerland, that I got inspired to design something similar.
I used white translucent glass and a completely opaque one – in fact black, to achieve the contrast it would have on the floor of the building when natural light came through. With colour, in this case large yellow and pink areas with black “lead” lines enhanced with thin green and purple ones, I tried to achieve a deconstructive Piet Mondrian effect.
