Golden Hour

During the creation of this piece Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered by DHS agents.

Because I post frequently about my artwork but almost never about politics, I feel morally obliged to say something about my feelings regarding the state of the world. 

 My art may not show it, but I am in a state of great fear for our democracy and disdain and utter disgust with our current administration.  Politically, I am a lefty democrat who votes in every single election and attends protests (which, btw, I do not enjoy.  I would rather be doing just about anything else!)

 Very deliberately, I have chosen not to make political art. It often feels reductive to me, even when I agree with its message, and I’m more interested in addressing the complex emotional expressions of individual experience. My work is personal rather than persuasive and given that those drawn to it tend to share my sensibilities, overtly political content would likely amount to preaching to the choir. This also applies to how I engage with social media.  I rarely post political content.

 There are times, like right now, when this attitude can feel like indulgence.  For the record, I don’t think it is. People always need to attend to the full spectrum of feelings and experience, no matter the political climate.  But I felt moved to explain this in case people are wondering if what appears to be silence means I don’t care and am not acting on my beliefs.  I do, very, very much care and I do act accordingly.  I just choose to express it by voting and protesting and not in my art or on social media.

 

And now, on to the “The Golden Hour”.

...a paean to self-soothing in hard times. 

  

"Golden Hour" 31.5"x27"

 

 

Conceptual:

Never mind the fact that I ripped the original "Reynardine" window from this yellow border and was seeking to reuse it somehow rather than throw it out...

 

In Creative and Mental Growth, child psychologist Viktor Lowenfeld describes ages 7-9 as the Schematic Stage. At this time, children develop symbols for things in the world. The radiating sun is one of the most obvious examples: a circle to stand for the sun, with lines to signify light or heat. Another would be individual blades of grass growing up from the bottom line of the page used to symbolize the ground.

 

In “The Golden Hour” I used this very recognizable schema as the organizing principle to arrange doodled elements of flora.  Basically, I just wanted to create a garden of imagined images—a big theme of my work for a while now.  I can’t seem to stop and as long as I find this intriguing and inspired, I will continue.

Working sketch

 

Apropos of politics, Dear Orange Leader has forced people to choose sides when it comes to conceptualizing reality as either science facts or “alternative facts”.  As if there weren’t reason to hate the guy enough, this hits close to home for me.  There is nothing more wonderful to me than “alternative facts”. I do not like being forced to choose between subjective and objective reality.  But I suppose an object lesson in the perils of fantasy is well taken.  However, I hope people never forget the value of myth.  As I have said many times recently, expressing one’s imagination is a RADICAL ACT.  Especially when “alternative facts” are being used to enforce some kind of sick conformity with a fascist.

“The Goden Hour” is intended, as much of my work is, as a picture to get lost in the details and to reflect on how nature and imagination work in symbiosis. Is there a place in the brain where the soul and brain matter “meet”? Is there a place in the material world where that meeting becomes manifest? To me, that is the “function” of “The Golden Hour”.

 

Technical: 

TO SEE A SHORT VIDEO OF THE STAGES OF THIS PIECE IN PROGRESS, CLICK HERE!

 

The piece was created with glass enamels—red for flesh and stencil black (formerly made by Reusche) mixed together to make a brown.  I mix with water and some glycerin. No gum arabic because I am painting on a sandblasted surface.  Yes—that was one crazy stencil!  It is basically the entire image in silhouette. It took over a day to cut it by hand (Xacto #11, about 20 blades died to make this stencil) and about 30 mins to sandblast. LOL, throwing the stencil in the garbage is always a treat.

 

 I would say the piece ended up having about 5-7 firings (1250 F) all in all.  I like to engrave the fired paint!  I also use files and diamond burrs unplugged. I go back and forth between painting, firing and then engraving—5-7 times as stated.  The yellow color is actually Orange silver stain—fired right on the paint layer! So there.

The glass is a Lambert’s white opalescent on clear.  The piece will be in a lightbox which is a dammed pity because that glass does lovely things to sunlight. 

 

 

Technical+Conceptual=The Golden Hour—

I think it’s false to find meaning only in the conceptual aspect. As the maker, I certainly find myself engaged in the making 90% compared to the 10% thinking about it!  Or something like that.

The piece required an intense focus on “being in the present” with the image.  Each stroke of the liner brush (Kafka #4 and #0 script liners) was an infinite world unto itself…more or less. The downside is that’s a hard place to get to mentally, but the upside is that’s very self-soothing!

Long live the unity of mind and body.

 

Nows here's some deets! 

Reynardine

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

Feet deet

Face deet

new wreath

layers of new wreath (lambert's r/cc and bl/clb

Fox engraving (lambert's bl/clb

red glass on the blue makes the fox red

Fox panel

Dirty Countertop

 

Still life—

When I was just a tadpole, I remember the horrible crisis of desperately wanting to make art but having no clue what I wanted to make art about.

What a dilemma, all this art energy and nothing to tie it to!  It didn’t help that the one thing I understood art to be was incredibly profound.  No pressure there!

 

I was still a painting major.  We were given little guidance—which I resented at the time but now I understand that to find one’s voice is an inside job and that it’s a fine line between influence and coercion.  Maybe I thought my teachers should have done more, but I was left with the sense that I did it all myself and how is that not actually a really good thing? 

 

In making visual art, I think of it as having three domains.  The visual, the material and the intellectual/expressive.  Eyes, hands and brains. All three are the subject of a work of art in different proportions.  But when we talk of the subject of a work of art, I think we reflexively think of it as the objects in the picture.  We think a picture of fruit is “about” the fruit.  But to the artist, it may merely be an excuse to get involved with paint.  Or color.  Or shapes. 

 

One has choices.  For example: historically speaking, on could pick some point on the design spectrum between optical realism and non-referential abstraction as a mode.  Another mode might be appropriation or ready-mades.

 

As subject, one could mine the territory of NOUNS—people, place and things; or still life, landscape or figuration.  Either as a recognizable subject or a launching point if one was abstract.

 

Blah blah blah…I started this post out with a lot of time and now I have none.  So, no. more musing on the mechanics of creative art making.

 

“Dirty Countertop” is a still life. Duh.  I haven’t done a still life since I was a sophomore in the painting department at RISD.  This example was when I wanted to be Wayne Thiebaud.

Still life—

When I was just a tadpole, I remember the horrible crisis of desperately wanting to make art but having no clue what I wanted to make art about.

What a dilemma, all this art energy and nothing to tie it to!  It didn’t help that the one thing I understood art to be was incredibly profound.  No pressure there!

 

I was still a painting major.  We were given little guidance—which I resented at the time but now I understand that to find one’s voice is an inside job and that it’s a fine line between influence and coercion.  Maybe I thought my teachers should have done more, but I was left with the sense that I did it all myself and how is that not actually a really good thing? 

 

In making visual art, I think of it as having three domains.  The visual, the material and the intellectual/expressive.  Eyes, hands and brains. All three are the subject of a work of art in different proportions.  But when we talk of the subject of a work of art, I think we reflexively think of it as the objects in the picture.  We think a picture of fruit is “about” the fruit.  But to the artist, it may merely be an excuse to get involved with paint.  Or color.  Or shapes. 

 

One has choices.  For example: historically speaking, on could pick some point on the design spectrum between optical realism and non-referential abstraction as a mode.  Another mode might be appropriation or ready-mades.

 

As subject, one could mine the territory of NOUNS—people, place and things; or still life, landscape or figuration.  Either as a recognizable subject or a launching point if one was abstract.

 

Blah blah blah…I started this post out with a lot of time and now I have none.  So, no. more musing on the mechanics of creative art making.

 

“Dirty Countertop” is a still life. Duh.  I haven’t done a still life since I was a sophomore in the painting department at RISD.  This example was when I wanted to be Wayne Thiebaud.

 

 

I did a still life now because I have been channeling the spirit of Joris Hoefnagel and drawing lots of froooooots.  Maybe they are an allegory about what happens when you don’t wipe down your countertops.  Maybe its drawing a parallel to other types of fleshy bodies.

 

Joris likes to draw combinations of fruit, insects, flowers and calligraphy.  I wish I had made his work, that’s how much I love it.

 

The big dilemma with this piece (as it often is) is where to cut the glass.  One can carefully follow the outlines of the objects, but then one must connect them to the sides of the piece leading things to look like crappy coloring book illustrations. This leads to a strange look like things being caught in spiderwebs or having superfluous antennae. Because I am engraving flash glass, I can put either no cut lines and just work large unbroken sheets like a painting or….something else.

This was kind of a combo.

 

 

 

 

 

Set List

 I am a genX male.  Hahaha!  Who knew?

I exercise int he morning and listen to my old iPod nano mix a setlist of about 880 songs.  This filters our the Classical.

Here's what it played for me today--ANNOTATED.

• Natural Blues-- Moby
• Ah! Leah! —Donnie Iris. (I still deeply love this song. Thank god they invented the internet so I could find it again)
• Little Maggie—Kentucky Thunder, Ricky Scraggs
• Sehnsucht—Ramstein
• Venus—Bananrama. (I also have the Shocking Blue version, which is  a lot better)
• If I Can’t Change Your Mind—Sugar
• We Used to Be Friends—Dandy Warhols
• Strumpet Eye—Guided by Voices
• Christine—Siouxsie and the Banshees
• We Don’t Exist—Meat Puppets
• I Desire—Devo
• I Love a Man in Uniform—Gang of Four
• 10:15 Saturday Night—The Cure (Hearing this today really resonated.  WHAT A BRILLIANT SONG!)
• Turn a Square—The Shins
• Bestafe Mich—Rammstein. (skipped this one.  One Rammstein a morning is enough)
• Chasing Heather Crazy—Guided by Voices. (I remember this as the song that was playing on 9/11 when I heard the World Trade Center towers went down.)
• Search and Destroy—Iggy and the Stooges
• One Way of Another—Blondie
• The Hives Introduce the Metric System in Time—The Hives
• Mirror in the Bathroom—The English Beat
• Down In It—Nine Inch Nails. (skipped this one, too)
• Time to Fall—Radio Birdman
• Needles for Teeth—The Jesus Lizard

So, I put the unannotated list  into Chatgpt and asked it to deduce the demographics of the person.  Of course it had A LOT to say...!  But this was the gist of it:

Probably a Gen X male, born in the late ’60s or early ’70s, based in the U.S., with deep knowledge of alternative, post-punk, and industrial music.
Possibly artistic, musically literate, or college-educated, with eclectic tastes that span from bluegrass to goth to indie rock. 

 

I know lots of people have big qualms with AI, I understand........ but I also asked it to make a picture of the new genX male me:

 

 

Post-Artum

 Greetings. Those of you with an interest in the creative process may wish to note that completing "Super/Natural"  did not result in feelings of massive satisfaction.  Well--it did and it didn't.

While I feel it is without doubt the....how to phrase this....the bestestest project of my life, I had a lot of really big FEELINGS about this once it was suddenly cast into the past tense. I am very proud of it, I would never not want to have made it.  But now what???  

So, one feeling I felt was "why go on?"  There's no way I want to compete with myself or try to somehow outdo it.  Constantly ratcheting up the s creative stakes and going for the "next level" can be a real creativity killer (although I do believe there's a time and place for that type of thing). However, in this case, the next move has to be a leap into terra incognita. In addition, I've been going full throttle for 45 years, so there's some burnout here. Leaping around sounds a wee bit exhausting.

The cure for burnout is PLAY.  Sadly, I have forgotten how to play.  Or it feels like I have. I know a little about this.  In order to play one must lower the stakes to basically zero. There can be no pressure to make anything in particular.  That's the end of that sentence: its not make something good, to make something profound, to make something by a certain date or in a certain material; whatever. Play means not making anything at all that fulfills any sort of expectation whatsoever, zero conditions--full stop.

All this to say I have had a little bit of difficulty getting back on track.

First piece: "Wondermoths".  (34"x34" approx

I was playing.  Mostly what I "want" when working is to make something amazing.  Then I have to simmer down some and tell myself I just want to make ANYTHING. Don't ask me about intentions--that was the intention! 

 

Its funny because in November I am speaking at CraftNow and the theme of the symposium this year is "intention".  I have a lot of thoughts on how we overvalue intention when discussing art and I will be sure to let everyone know in Nov!  But, the one sentence version of it is, at the end of the day, who cares?  For example: maybe with "Wondermoths" I intended to make a piece comparing the gathering of insects by a light source to a solar system. Maybe I intended to say something about the attraction of light (which is a major obsession with stained glass artists if any of the AGG conferences I have attended is any indication.)

 

But the truth?  My only intention was to make the thing.  Every time I start thinking "what's it all about" I hit a massive choke point and the only way I can actually go on is to forget about intention.  Just make the damned thing!  I try to advise my students to think about this stuff when its DONE and not a moment sooner.  The role of thinking in art is tricky.  I don't want to encourage my students worst tendencies to be idiots.  But as I said--intention is overvalued and I hate crits where a student gets rewarded for making the thing they thought of.  I believe art is a process of making something you haven't though of!  But its OK to figure out what it was you did later.

What does "Wondermoths" mean?  you tell me.   

 

Next piece, still in progress.

"Dirty Countertop"

I can't believe I am doing a still life!  Why??? Oh god, why??   

Composite sketch.  Background is pencil, pen and photoshop.  Fruits and veggies are photos of glass.

Glass pieces

Cartoon (with pencil drawing (I never do that!)

 

 

 

Super/Natural

 Greetings fellow humans!

Here is a video to experience the dome via video:

 

If you wish to read and learn about the dome, there is a brief essay at the bottom of this post.

Here are a bunch of photos (mostly) by Dom Episcopo

“Super/Natural” is a stained glass environment representing a “three-tiered cosmos”.

 

In 2023, I became an artist in residence at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics.  This project is the result of attending their lab meetings over the course of a year and a half and is the time it took to complete the dome.

 

The dome is 8 feet high at its tallest and 5’6” in diameter.  The windows were designed and fabricated by me. The dome architecture was designed by me in collaboration with carpenter Patrick Murray who contributed his architectural background and engineering skill.

 

Thank you to Dr Anjan Chatterjee and Penn Center forNeuroaesthetics (PCfN), Claire Oliver Gallery, Patrick Murray, Konstantin Sievaplesov (studio assistant), Richard Prigg, and Glenn Carter. 

 

I would like to express my immense gratitude to my parents, Moselio and Barbara Schaechter. My father, who served as the chairman of Microbiology at Tufts University for 23 years, awakened in me a love of science—especially through his collection of antique mushroom books, with their fantastic illustrations. My mother, former director of the League School of Boston (now the League School of Autism), nurtured my curiosity about the human mind from an early age through books and conversations. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for your inspiration and support.

 

 

One of the research themes at Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics is “the built environment and wellness”.  It was there that I learned of

biophilicdesign. Biophilic principles are often used in hospitals and office buildings to create “refresh rooms” and non-secular chapels—places to lower stress and encourage feelings of serenity and peace.  It comes as no surprise that reconnecting with nature is healing.  Like many urban people, I myself have very rarely experienced wild spaces. I don’t own a car, and I have been city-bound most of my life. Super/Natural is a response to that condition.

 

Without delving too deeply into mysticism, it seems biophilic design offers an opportunity to reconcile human consciousness with the environment. It challenges the perceived divide between mind and body, person vs nature, as well as the mental distinction between "interior vs. exterior" or "self vs. not-self”, revealing it as a perceptual illusion. While this distinction has practical heuristic value, it also fosters loneliness and isolation.  I suspect this disconnection enables social and ecological harm. My goal was to create something that “heals” this divide.

 

By situating the viewer at the center of a three-tiered cosmos, Super/Natural invites contemplation of both inner space—how we experience environments neurologically and psychologically—and outer space—how we extend ourselves into our surroundings. I aimed to inspire reflection on our interdependence with all life on Earth, encouraging an internalized sense of connection akin to viewing the "blue marble," from within rather than from the far-off perspective of outer space.  We are ultimately connected to, not just observing nature.

 

Although I am not religious, I chose a chapel as a direct reference to spiritual architecture that uses art for reflection, awe, and transcendence. As a stained glass artist, I am acutely aware that my work is exhibited in lightboxes, not in churches and temples as is traditional. Thus, I have thought for years that I would like to make a “personal shrine” for a single viewer.  This goes against the convention of thinking in the monumental terms suggested by cathedrals as well as many contemporary art venues. Western culture tends to revere the huge and sublime while undervaluing the small, intimate, and inscendent. This preference for grandeur creates physical and psychological distance between the viewer and the stained glass. I sought to collapse that separation. Moreover, stained glass in churches and public spaces is almost always designed for a collective audience. In the age of mass media, there’s a temptation to assume that reaching the largest number of people is inherently better. Super/Natural challenges that notion by offering a semi-private experience.

 

The imagery in Super/Natural references nature, but it is entirely derived from my imagination. It is intended to evoke the sense of nature as understood by a human mind—similar to the natural history images that influenced my childhood. They are, ultimately, about invoking nature more than depicting it. At PCfN, I learned that creativity is often tested using the 'Alternative Uses Test,' in which subjects are asked to generate as many uses as possible for a common object—like a brick—within a limited time. The test is scored across four dimensions (fluency, originality, flexibility and elaboration).   The flower and bird imagery in the dome was a challenge to my imagination.  How many flowers, birds and bugs could I invent before my inspiration ran dry? What would this say about the potential for the inventive capacity of drawing? I hope I have discovered that imagination is potentially infinite!

 

Imagination is often thought of as frivolous or a waste of time. But what could be more amazing than the extension of consciousness beyond what feels possible, beyond reality?  It is my belief that expressing one’s authentic imagination is the most important, radical thing we can do as conscious beings.  It is my belief the mind can conjure feelings of awe independent of external experience (and substances) and hopefully the dome will prove to be an example of that.

 

One final historical link that bears mentioning is that the botanical prints that inspired the work were often created by women as this was a permissible art form for them in the 17^th Century. No wonder they are so amazing looking—all that artistic energy had to be funneled into this one constricting art mode!

 

The composition is based on the cross-cultural theme of a "three tiered cosmos".  The ten panels at eye level represent the "Earthly Domain". These panels consist of images of plants and insects in a profusion of exuberant life.  Below are ten panels of wallpaper representing the "Under World".  The imagery includes roots, unhatched larva, buried bones, mycelium and other motifs of underground.  The "Heavens", the geodesic dome itself, contains 45 triangular panels.  This area depicts a murmuration of colorful birds and stars.  Underfoot is a carpet of my design depicting a whirlpool, mirroring the spiral of birds above.

 

Techniques

I use a material called "Flash Glass”.  Flash glass is a type of hand-blown glass with a paper-thin veneer of intense color on a base layer of lighter color.  One reason there is a lot of color in each section of my pictures is that the flash glass is layered, typically two pieces deep, red on clear and blue on clear with the addition of black enamel and silverstain.

 

I cut the glass using a steel wheel cutter and a grozing or running pliers.  The next step is sandblasting, a process by which one can remove the colored layer, to get patterns and tones.  After sandblasting, I engrave finer details using rotary tools and create smooth tonal shifts in color with diamond hand files.

When the engraving is done, I add black enamel which fires onto glass permanently. I also use silverstain (which is yellow). I used a fuchsia transparent enamel in places as well.  This is all the paint I use--all the other color is the flash glass itself.  The use of red and blue glass, combined with small amounts of black, yellow, and pink enamel, produces a full-color spectrum within a single section of glass, eliminating the need for a cut line.

The wallpaper originated from two high-resolution images of previous stained glass windows I created based on pencil sketches. These images were manipulated with Photoshop software to combine them with stained glass-like transparency.

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Here are the “Cliff Notes” supplied by Chatgpt:

 

Summary of Key Themes

1. Biophilic design and reconnection with nature
2. Healing psychological and social divides and creating connections
3. Interior vs. exterior space and dissolving boundaries
4. Imagination as a force for creativity and transformation
5. Resistance to monumentalism in favor of intimacy
6. The symbolic structure of the three-tiered cosmos
7. Technical mastery of stained glass craft
8. Art as a site for awe, reflection, and transcendence

 

These themes are interconnected, reinforcing the overarching goal of Super/Natural to invite viewers into a deeply personal, immersive experience that explores the connections between self, nature, and imagination.