Stained Glass

My stained glass work has a much different look and feel, as the medium offers me something completely different.  The finished pieces tend to be of a lighter, more subdued and decorative nature.  Everything about them, start to finish, is cleaner and more controlled.  The creative time and energy is expended up front as I carefully craft my composition and select the perfect glass for the piece.  The many hours that follow are simply about execution.  I no longer have a multitude of creative decisions to make, I have only to make.

This level of preliminary planning followed by lengthy periods of mere execution never appealed to me in the past, but I yearn for it now as a mother of young children.  There is control and order to it.  It is tidy.  As I work in stained glass I find I can gradually clear my head, rather than getting more and more lost in the unpredictable process of repeatedly applying, burning-in, and responding to the encaustic medium, or – similarly exhausting – engaging in the slow, often frustrating buildup of forms in a drawing.  Working with glass is a spiritual, meditative practice, allowing me to enjoy being fully present with the necessarily repetitive and meticulous nature of the medium.  I love the varied textures and colors of the glass, the weight of it, and the act of scoring, breaking and grinding it to its exact shapes.  It is an active, very physical process – similar to that of encaustic – involving the use of my whole body.  However, it is also a painstaking process that requires a level of planning, focus, and precision that I am finding appealing in this season of my life.  I can become absorbed in it, but not mentally drained.