EyeCandy - Kilnformed and Torchworked Glass Information Site

I put up my first web site well over ten years ago using Microsoft FrontPage. The focus of the site was my adventures in glass fusing, and teaching various glass fusing techniques. I did this for a number of years and almost made a go of it. But for various reasons decided it was time to move onto other things. I posted a blog post here a few months ago on the Elements of Design in Glass Art, and it has been one of the most popular posts. Because of that I've decided to point glass enthusiasts to my old site which has tons of information on glass fusing.

You can find EyeCandy at http://www.jimbolesdesigns.com/eyeCandy/index.html

There are lots of informative pages and links spread throughout. It was going to be the contact place for my students at the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center in Minneapolis, and for my community education classes.

You will also find a lot of glass fusing information at this blog, if you go back to 2010 and before (see links at the left panel) .

Hope you find the information useful. Enjoy!
 

Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center Fundraiser

The Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center, the hottest art center in the Twin Cities, is holding a gala event to raise funds in preparation of its opening. Here are some details below. For the full story visit the site at http://fireartscenter.blogspot.com.

We're delighted to announce our next big event, "A Fundraiser to Remember," which will take place on April 22, from 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis.

This is one fundraiser that promises to live up to its name! We’re honored to have two critically acclaimed—and entirely unique—local musical acts lending their incredible talents in support of CAFAC: Jazz vocalist Charmin Michelle and Cajun Country musician Kevin Anthony & The Twin City Playboys. We're also proud to present the world premiere of the short documentary about how CAFAC got started.

Weaves, Tiles, and Painting

 

There are all kinds of glass working, and many types I thought I would never do. However, now that I'm making a living at it I'm finding  reasons to do things that I would have never pursued before. Glass weaving isn't something I would choose to do for myself. It is a technical trick and one of those gee-wiz techniques that makes you ask 'how was that done'.  It impresses people and can be fun to do, but unless I get the inspiration to push it in new directions I'll just be teaching the technique to students.

Glass tiles on the other hand I'm doing as part of my attempt to break into the commercial area of art glass. I hope to work with a couple of local interior designers as part of their design team where I produce custom glass as kitchen accents and other home decor uses. Any color combination is possible and on top of that I have the whole arsenal of design techniques that go far beyond the commercial looking tiles here.You can see a whole set of more artsy tiles on my main web site
 

The glass powder painting below is a finished product. I showed a study for it in a prior post. I intend to pursue large scale powder painting in the future at the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center. I will also be teaching the technique there.

The glass powder painting below took three firings and was my first attempt at layering the powder on over one inch thick to achieve the mountainous look. Brushes, sifters, and mostly my fingers are used to create the design. I call it painting, but it really is more like creating sand art images where by you manipulate the powders in powder form. One of the main challenges to keep in mind as you put the powders on is what the they will look like after being fired. Their prefired color is usually a lot lighter than after firing. It can be tricky, and you seldom get it right in the first firing. Because the base glass is 1/4 inch thick and is 20x29 inches the glass had to fire for nearly a day. In the mean time you hold your breath until you can peak into the kiln to see what the finished piece will look like.

This is a fairly indirect way to produce art, unlike painting where you just put the paint on and what you see is what you get. One reason I like it though (beside the fact that I'm a glass artist) is that it is a seldom used medium. It's exciting to be working in a way that is fairly unique. It is somewhat related to enameling in that you start with a powder, but that's about the only relation. The thickness, the powdery texture, the high relief, and the scale of the work are a few of the characteristics that make it a relatively new way of working in glass.

I'm very excited to be forging this new direction and have only begun the journey.

Little is new however in glass working since periods of exploration have come and gone dating back to ancient Egypt. On the technical side what is intriguing to me about this approach is that I'm only using 90 COE glass powder, and not enamels, paints, stains or any other media but pure glass powder. This restriction is an arbitrary choice, and I intend to experiment with low-fire enamels as a finale stage in the painting process. The reason for this restriction comes from a long standing decision that I only use 90 COE glass, which is a technical category of art glass, in all of my work. You have to create boundaries in order to focus your efforts. Once the basics are understood of a technique then it makes sense to expand the horizons with new materials.

However because of this restriction for many years I was totally frustrated with glass. I wanted it to behave like paint, but the chemical makeup of glass prevents you from thinking like a painter, and glass ultimately restricts your color choices if you can't mix colors at will... unless you like a collection of very different browns.

As many glass artists know, if you mix glass powder and fire it from its powder form back into solid glass the mixed colors will not result in what you expect. For example, yellow and green do not yield a yellow-green hue. Instead the mix gives you brown. This is true for may color combinations.

The magic of glass powder painting is that you do not allow the powders to chemically interact. When firing the glass you stop before the powders liquefy to glass preventing them from chemically interacting. The trick is to fire the powder only to the point that the particles of glass tack fuse together, remaining sand-like, but do not physically meld into one another resulting in chemical interactions.

You have to keep in mind that all glass is basically made of sand AKA silica. Metal oxides are added to silica to give it color. For example, blue is derived from cobalt, red is from gold, and yellows from silver.It is the metal content of glass that interacts when you allow powders to return to their glass state. When firing the powder only to the state that the granules are attached to each other and to the base sheet you then allow the powders to be permanently fixed, but not chemically  intermixed.

You can mix powder colors in tints, shades and across hues, and you get the color you mixed and not brown.

I think that is this aspect of glass powder painting that has not been explored thoroughly and what excites me to prob deeper. It is not a new media, and not a totally new technique. Glass powder painting uses a very old media (glass) with a very deliberate desire to expand the scale of work and to move glass further into the territory of classical art forms.

I hope what I have done so far is just the tip of the mountain.

Another Designs For Good Effort

In an effort to raise money and awareness of the Chicago Ave. Fire Arts Center (CAFAC) I will be embarking on a collaboration with two other artists namely Laura d Juul (Precious Metal Clay) and Larry Fahnoe (Metaling working). We will be creating a series of wall hangings based on our various skills. Larry will create the metal frame, I will create the glass powder painting to be framed and Laura and I will collaborate on the matting around the painting. The matting will be enameled copper with precious metal clay (sliver) decorative accents.

Our mission will be to have them placed on permanent display at local galleries to help spread the word about the center. We'll have informational postcards available so that the public can read out the center and its dual goal of arts education and neighborhood revitalization.

Of course, they will be for sale also with all proceeds going to the center.

Stayed tuned for pictures and progress of this effort.

Powderhorn Art Fair

Spent most of this weekend in Minneapolis participating in the yearly Powderhorn Art Fair. Nice location along one of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes and all of the arts and crafts you can handle. The Chicago Ave Fire Arts Center had a meet-and-greet booth there, and we told the story of the center's startup early next year. It will be a unique center teaching welding, enameling, neon, blacksmithing, jewelery, precious metal clay, and kilnformed glass which I will be teaching.

One of the goals of the weekend was to show what will be taught. For instance the piece below is an example of what could be done by a student. The metal work and the glass work (glass powder painting) would be taught over several classes. The center will encourage this type of mixed media collaborative effort.

Creativity & Collaboration

In the post Why Designs For Good I discussed some motivational factors for giving my work or the proceeds from sales to nonprofit organizations. I stated that this act of giving is in no way selfless or some sort of bleeding heart liberal indulgence. Today's post is an example of receiving far more in return through the act of giving, and being open to 'outside' influences in your creative life.

Just the opposite of that openness is my Circular Obsessions series was a truly obsessively driven singular pursuit of realizing an inner vision by minimizing outside influences. This inner vision came with a set of very restricting standards the sum of which is hard to explain, but I'll list a few for discussion sake.

• Color was fairly restricted
• Almost all surfaces had to have unique texturing
  
• The disparate media types had to have a seamless integrated look
• Each piece in the series had to have at least two glass styles: cast glass, kilnworked glass or torchworked

There were many other criteria which I had little control over. Things just either looked and felt right or they didn't. The object 'resonated' or it didn't. When working with/through this inner vision thing you can't talk yourself into a compromise. If it isn't right it just isn't right, and no amount of rationalization will work to change that.

And what I mean by criteria which I had little control over will need to be a subject of another post. For now, just ask yourself.. what is my favorite color, and do you know why? Or why do some people like abstracts and others do not? Suffice it to say that on some very fundamental level we do not control our preferences for certain types of sensation, and my posit - as it pertains to my inner vision thingee - is that it was more in control of me than I in control of its driving aesthetic preferences.

At times I would obsess for a month over how to best hide a seam between two components. In extreme cases it may take over six months to get a glass component both structurally sound and aesthetically 'correct', with many failures along the way.

Working under these conditions is a sort of aesthetic tyranny, which you accept as the process of creation, but it can become oppressive as it seeks an end result which seems continually out of reach.

Needless to say, in this mindset outside influences such as: will it sell; what gallery will show it; or even the basic financial concern of the cost of production versus potential of return are not in consideration. All of which serves to illustrate the somewhat irrational aspects of the inner vision thing.

After completing the Circular Obsessions odyssey I turned my sculpture studio into a photography studio and really didn't have a plan for glass into the future, until I was invited to teach kilnformed glass at Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center (CAFAC), and then some odd things started to happen.

This inner vision thing relentlessly pursued its end and thereby eliminated whole sets of creative potential. Even within the glass area I was restricted to a certain look which eliminated almost everything else in glass except 'the look'.

When I opened myself to 'give' my time to CAFAC the whole world of glass opened back up to me. In short order I found Powder Painting, created an extensive array of art glass tiles which I will be marketing, and most recently have begun experiments in enameling.

This is a copper foil lotus flower I recently prototyped as a small part of a collaborative sculpture which will help illustrate CAFAC's multi media emphasis. It is an example of how glass and metal can be integrated into a single work of art, and what students can learn at the Fire Arts Center.

Being primarily a glass artist I struggled for many weeks trying to make glass flowers, and they always looked.... well like glass flowers. They didn't fit the overall feel of the sculpture which is a collection of found objects mostly of metal.

The final lotus flowers could have multiple layers of petals where the lower layers of petals are only slightly enameled showing mostly copper, and thereby integrating into the largely metal sculpture.

OK, maybe I was just ripe for doing new things after completing Circular Obsessions, and maybe I just needed to get out more instead of being all wrapped up in the inner vision thingee.

That's true, but it was the opening up and the giving away in powerful combination which has totally changed how I now approach my work, and who I am as a creative person. I can see now that collaboration will be a key factor in setting directions, and collaboration will provide a rich open field of creative adventures which will far outstripped what I could have imagined before.

Giving my work away will open doors and provide advantages not available to the lone wolf artist I was. And again, nothing is really being given away. Materials must be paid for from the proceeds, and there are obviuos returns in the form of marketing and publicity.

My goal is to maximize the proceeds so that significant funds are generated for a nonprofit, and as discussed in other posts, that is not a simple process. To that end I will be contacting organizations like the Craft Emergency Relief Fund (CERF) for their assistance and advice, and potentially to organize an event for the sale of Circular Obsessions to benefit CERF.

One last note... Enameling is very expensive, especially on a large scale. A large panel of 30x40 inches may take several hundred dollars of enamel powder. So, being a glass artist and having just discovered Powder Painting for myself.... hmmm, can I enamel with my glass powders which are far cheaper than those wee little jars of enamels? Can I make 30x40 enamel panels with Bullseye glass?

Sure.. why not... stay tuned.

I'm On the Cover of Rolling Stone!

Well, not really. My work has been chosen to be on the cover of Sculptural Pursuit magazine which like Rolling Stone for sculptors. I'm very excited and honored. The series I've titled Circular Obsessions has been in the making for many years. Hard to say when it really started. I guess like most artists it takes half a life time to form your aesthetic vocabulary, and the other half you might actually make something interesting.

The short of it is, I'm just attracted to round shapes in both two and three dimensions, and these form the core of my vernacular. When I approached color studies in glass I used the sphere as my form. To create the majority of the work a lathe was used as a natural tool for creating the family of rounded shapes. The lathe enabled me to prototype from sketches fairly quickly. I'd work pine to get the shape right, then turn the final pieces in various solid-surface materials like Corina. These materials don't suffer from expansion and contraction and grain issues. I love wood, but not for this series.

Many of the original turned pieces where subsequently cast in bronze, some were copper plated, and few cherry wood items where stained black and coated with powdered silicon carbide to match the dark patina of the finished metal pieces.

The glass spheres and kilnformed glass elements bring color and textural contrast to the finished works. Putting it simply and straight forward, the form of the sculptures are elaborate housings for the jewels of glass.



The image above is the one chosen to be on the cover of the issue due out later this year. It is called Aeon. Most of the works have short names that kind of relate to the the work, but I don't agonize over the meaning behind the names. You can see all of the sculptures here.

We completed the telephone interview for the article this weekend. Marilyn Noble, the managing editor allowed me talk her ear off. I sent a follow up email to apologize for the running monologue. It's not that often that I talk about my work. I'm usually just buried in the studio making stuff.

I guess I have been getting out more lately though. I dropped off a delivery of finished art glass panels to Heather Doyle who is one of the founding members of the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center (CAFAC see Related Links). She will be creating metal frames to complete the wall hangings. Heather will be teaching metal working at CAFAC, and it will be wonderful for me to teach and collaborate there when it opens later this year.

I'll be working with Heather and her students to create frames for the wall hangings and other sculpture pieces. The goal is to place the pieces in galleries and hopefully on permanent display to raise awareness and funds (when sold) for CAFAC. The work will be examples of what can be done by students when they come to CAFAC.

The powder painting image posted in a previous blog post and this image below will be examples of works which we will placed in galleries, and can actually be done by a student in one weekend class.



I also met with Brian Madson (as mentioned in prior posts) and we had our first discussion on the practicalities and barriers to creating a nonprofit media center. I was really impressed with his experience level. He has worked many media projects for some of the largest nonprofits in the country.

I can see at this point that Brian and I have our work cut out for us, and we'll need to take careful steps along this journey.

I also made two trips to J Ring Glass over the weekend to satisfy my addiction to glass. J Ring is the largest art glass supplier in the upper Midwest. They set the record for their largest single-day store sales this last Saturday. Given the recession we are in that was surprising to hear - I just had to help in breaking the record! Any excuse will do to buy glass!

And I did find some exciting glass. Bullseye is continually expanding their line. They created this ultra blue iridescent glass which I'm really excited about.

Hello World!

Funny, I do actually remember having my first Pascal program's output say 'Hello World!" all those years ago on my Apple //c.

This blog was created to share my many adventures in the arts and graphic design. I'll be posting or linking to how-to projects as they are created. For instance, I'm currently excited about the technique I'm calling powder painting, and will be posting advice on how to create your own masterpieces :) You can see more examples at my site.



For those who like hands-on education I'll be teaching the technique at the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center (CAFAC) later this year, as well as basic kilnformed glass techniques.

On the more serious side of this blog I will be exploring the use my various graphic art, photography, web, and other skills to aid nonprofit organizations. CAFAC (an official NPO) is one of my first forays and there will be more.

I recently met up with Brian Madson who has years of Marketing & Communications experience and apparently we both have been thinking the same thought. That is, to start a media services company which is a nonprofit itself, and whose mission is to serve other nonprofits. This is a very involved idea and the development of the idea will be the source of many posts here.

By chance I met up with Brian via the Minnesota Nonprofit Counsel. I submitted my idea to them and as you might expect they also knew Brian was exploring this idea and they put 2 and 2 together. That's networking, and that is why I started this blog. There is no telling who will cross this path when walking the Internet.

So there you have it. My first blog post.