Late Braking Gnus: 2026

The million dollar question in any artist interview is always some variation on “where do you get your ideas from?” I hate being asked this, but I always want to know when I am reading about other artists!
So, here’s a new piece with an interesting idea development trajectory and I can say something about where the idea came from, or what inspired me, but I am not convinced that this will be very interesting or insightful. I certainly don’t think it would add much to someone’s enjoyment (or disdain, whatever) of the actual piece. What’s interesting is the journey it took from inception to completion. When looking at a piece like this one, it might be natural to assume I set about doing an illustration of the Fairport Convention song “Reynardine”. But that was actually the last step! The piece had exactly nothing to do with the song or folk legend for 99% of its creation.

Reynardine, as mentioned, is a song by Fairport Convention, another great version by Bert Jansch. It is based on an old folk ballad from England. The original tells a story of “bandit or outlaw who encounters a young woman in the wilderness and seduces or abducts her. The song ends with a warning to young women to beware of strange men.” In the early 1900’s a verse connecting the character to the character from the middle ages, Reynard the Fox, appeared. In this case as a “werefox” (who knew!) The last verse goes:

Sun and dark she followed him
His teeth did brightly shine
And he led her up a-the mountains
Did that sly, bold Reynardine

click to embiggen!

That’s a lot of ink for part of a piece that didn’t exist until it was nigh well completed! The point being, an artist may not know until later what in the heck the thing is even about. I certainly don’t.

graphite, 2019

The piece began with a drawing done in 2020, during Covid, which I will remind you was 2020-2023. I did a lot of fancy pencil drawings during that time. This was the last one. How did it arise? Who knows. I usually start with a face doodle from a sketchbook and stick it on a body and then draw the whole thing over. The one thing I DO recall is that I was thinking I should age my characters since they all seem around 12 years old and every year I get further and further away from that! When I work figuratively, I like to be able to relate to my characters. As is typical the sketch lay in my flat file for several years before I felt any need to do anything with it. During that time, I did make this video with the drawing.

In January of 2025, I finished the stained glass for Super/Natural, the wooden dome structure was still being built, and I didn’t want to start a new project until the entire thing was done and out of my studio and brain. As a time filler, I decided to do the top part of the old woman figure in blue glass. When the dome was done, however, I didn’t feel like working on it and proceeded to make two other pieces in the spring of 2025.
Wondermoths
Dirty Countertop

Then in the summer I taught a Corning Studio. Another instructor there at the time was my friend Laura Donefer. She came into the classroom one day and was fiddling with some of my samples and layered them in a way I hadn’t thought of before, which I found very exciting, and it occurred to me it would be perfect to resolve the blue old lady using her idea.

But then my dad passed away. All previous plans were canceled for a while there and then the semester began and yikes…

I picked up the project again on and off during the fall, working on the figure with the Laura Donefer idea. It’s common to reflect on one’s own mortality when a loved one passes, and piece took on new meaning as I dealt with the grief relating to my father’s death.

When I work figuratively, I often make the figure in glass before I even have an idea for the rest of the piece. It’s just a character with no context, no background. When I was a cigarette smoker, I would look at the character and smoke cigarettes until some resolution suggested itself. I quit smoking New Years of 2000 and spent a year trying to figure out how to make art again! This “contemplative” part of the process was the most affected and I confess, I still feel it. So, I chew gum and stare at the light table…! Or more commonly putz around in Photoshop doing things to pictures of the figure until one sticks.

Tryin' to figure out a resolution for the figure

In this case it was the motif of the “semi-arch/ wreath of flowers”. I liked the way it suggested being “cut off” compositionally, which fit in with the death motif. And then, all at once, I saw it! The shape was the Grim Reaper’s scythe blade! Perfect! Yay!

Then I went and did a BIG CREATIVE NO-NO. And what might that be? I decided to make it look like the bouquet the bird is barfing in “Efflorescence” (Link: scroll down!). Of course, what I really wanted was to make an analogous bouquet that had all the same wonderful qualities (dark, mysterious, glowing) but I also wanted it to be simultaneously different…well that’s kind of a big ask! See what my brain did? It said, “make it the same, but different”! Lol, brain, you goose!
I set about this by printed out pictures of the glass layering from “Efflorescence”, studied it carefully blah blah blah blah blah…

Me trying to copy me and failing (thank god!)

And I made a thing. It looked really different from “Efflorescence”, which made me cranky, and the color didn’t work great with the figure and therefore I didn’t like it. That’s why this is a BIG CREATIVE NO-NO. Disappointment was baked in from the start, and I knew it. But creativity is hard. In my mind creativity is predicated on going into the unknown and here I was depending on something I did a few years back.

Even worse? It wasn’t actually bad. There’s nothing that gets to me more than something that’s just okay. What the fuckety fuck??? GAAA! I think I would have gone for it except for this: I also didn’t like the size of the copperfoil lines and the color of the border. There’s mediocrity and then there’s a tipping point of just too much mediocrity…. Not to mention that every fix I tried just led to other complications and the piece (especially in person—it’s not so evident in photos) started to look heavy, technically wonky and over-engineered.

I made a thing.

NOW WHAT?

When I finally surrendered to the idea it just wasn’t working and I should take it apart and start again I felt great relief. Especially as I decided to save the other parts and assemble them as a separate “study”. It’s not so bad to make two pieces instead of one! Because I am clever, I figured I would remake the “scythe blade” sections in a new colorway before disassembling anything, JUST. IN. CASE. And if I could make something better than the first, then I would go ahead and take it apart.

unmaking the thing

the other part of the unmade thing

And this is what happened. I really liked the new colorway (and now I had two sets of “scythe blade parts and could experiment with mixing and matching them in two different ways and see what happens which is always a ton of fun). So, I went ahead and disassembled the original piece.
Disassembling copperfoil constructions (especially layered ones) is akin to sticking your hand down a garbage disposal and turning it on. What a PAIN IN THE ASS that is! (and YES: some parts may get damaged or destroyed in the process which is why not every repair is worth it) And when its finally apart, the glass is covered with filth and goo. It took a whole day just to clean that gunk up and restore the glass to workable condition.

As for the “study” piece: having decided that I would make a second piece, the conditions had to be radical acceptance. If tight-assery had led the first attempt to utter mediocrity, then the study had to be FUN. FUN, DAMMITOL, FUN! Fun for me looks like this. I sit with pictures in photoshop and think, “what would be fun?”. Then I think “Netflix would be fun!” or “doomscrolling reels on Instagram would be really fun!” Hmmm……
When did I get to the point where art wasn’t fun? This is a pity, methinks. But playing as an adult doesn’t feel like playing did when I was a child.

Redone new wreath area

Comparison of blue layers (the new one is one the left sides)

Redone panel

FUN turned out to be a fox. Really an extremely random choice. But I felt a “fun vibe” emanating. At first, I didn’t want to use it because I have used it before (in “Fleeing Foxes”) and I kinda have a rule not to reuse characters. But I have entered into a stage of life where that rule feels tyrannical and pointless. Plus, it won’t be the same when I am done. And, of course, it looked FUN.
In the spirit of FUN, DAMMITOL, I put a flower in the fox’s mouth. Extra fun!
All this happened in less than an hour. And with the fox, the old scythe blade sections will look just fine, so it’s no longer even mediocre, it has been somehow redeemed! Which would be good but now…the pressure is back on. Oh no!

Photoshop phox

The power of a “study” piece is all psy-ops. I give “perfection” (whatever that even is) a low priority and FUN a higher one and allow myself, not to be mediocre, but to be shitty and voila! Pressure to make something good is probably the stupidest way to make something good and I know it…and yet that thought doth persist.

Then something magical happened. This came completely from left field, so to speak. I very suddenly (while exercising, if you must know) saw in my head that I could make one piece out of both pieces. Because stained glass is transparent, I could flip the study to create an archway out of the scythe blades (which will no longer read as such, btw, but whatevs)

I was giddy with excitement! I made a sketch in photoshop. I sent it to my trusted pal, Tina who said, “but what does it mean?” … oh yeah, it went from a sitting woman to a woman somehow in relationship to a fox. Sitting people in art don’t need a narrative. Usually, they are portraits. But even when they aren’t they are understood as a complete idea unto themselves. No one demands to know why they are just sitting there. But if you add a fox? Well, that does change things a bit. Now it has a real narrative, people wanna know…what does the fox mean? whoooopsy….!

Well, to be honest, I couldn’t care less about narrative and if it looks good, it gets a pass and I figure the idea that an artist should be somehow in control of narrative is nuts. That’s an art school torture device at the end of the day. Real art in the real world? No one gives a shit about the artist’s narrative control unless the piece is so utterly bereft that’s the ONLY thing it has going for it…sad times…. People are really good at reading stories into pictures. They don’t need to be told, even when its super ambiguous.

The whole idea of Reynardine happened in a split second. Feel free to ignore it. In the song, it is implied the women Reynardine lures are murdered. I mean, aren’t they always???? There are so many folk tales, ballads, true crime accounts, news stories, blah de blah de blahblahblah where the woman gets killed in the end. You’d almost be tempted to think it’s always open season on women.

ANYWAY:
In my piece, she lives to a ripe old age. Perhaps her dying thought is to recollect that she lost her virginity to a werefox.

And that, dear reader is how a piece about covid became a piece about feminism, while always being a piece about death and dying.

Some Deets 4U