Vivid Abstractions

To sense the invisible, and to be able to create it — that is art.
—Hans Hoffman (abstract expressionist painter and teacher)

My latest projects aren’t “pictures” of anything. They don’t express my moods — except a sense of wonder at the beauty I find in pieces of glass. My process is quite simple. I’ll hold a sheet of colored glass up to the light and discover a pattern or texture that intrigues me. Then I’ll cut away the less interesting glass, arrange my selection inside a zinc frame, and secure the piece with grooved lead. Then I repeat the process with a contrasting color or texture. Over the course of several hours the zinc frame is filled, and I proceed to soldering the joints and finishing the window. These windows measure 18” by 13”.

Hans Hoffman would teach his students about his concept of push and pull, which he defined as “expanding and contracting forces.” He wrote: “At the end of his life and the height of his capacity Cézanne understood color as a force of push and pull. In his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of colors.”

As Pablo Picasso put it, “God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.” When people complained that some of Picasso’s art was too hard to understand, he replied: “Why do people try to understand art? Why not try to understand the song of a bird?”

I don’t begin a window with a pre-conceived title and then force the glass pieces to match it. Instead, I give a title to each window after it’s finished. This way, I can keep track of the different windows I make. Better than just giving each one a number!