Laying Low, Laboring On

Since the Chaffee County Home and Garden Show back in April, I’ve skipped the usual local festivals here in Buena Vista so far. The reasons are several, one of which being the Chamber of Commerce change of hands. I was uneasy about that, and unfortunately for local vendors (and for the new Chamber folks), things did not go well for the local festival scene this summer. In addition, our local arts organization, Chaffee Arts, also suffered a change of hands and possible dissolving as a 501c organization. So, to put it mildly, the arts scene in Buena Vista if not Chaffee County as a whole is suffering some. I had decided early on to lay low and see how things panned out. Turns out that was a good decision in terms of hassles and disappointments if not monetarily for GEA.

But for me, doing glass art has never been exclusively tied to a local arts scene.

So, for the bulk of spring and summer, I worked on and finished up a private landscape piece for a friend in NE. The piece is of Bead Mountain (left side of the formation), and the full moon rising through that evening landscape. The picture took 7 firings, and I (as usual) wish parts of it could have been better, but my friend is happy, and he had it in time for a family reunion in August. Here it is on his fireplace mantle a couple days before the big event.

I now have begun the research and development of a new and exciting series of pieces based on birds. (Those of you who know me well are saying, What else would it be??) I’m not talking doing representations of their bodies, but rather visual representations of their songs, complete with a small audio sample attached to the piece. The color palette will be based on the colors of the bird. Some panels, such as the prototype I'm working on now, will be transparent, while others will be opaque. I may use dichroic powers, too.

I decided to start with the bird I know the best, my parrot, Baby.

I had this idea back in the Spring, and having recovered her from a 3-day escape, it seems even more appropriate now. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 11 years studying her feathers and features. Depending on the light or angle of the light, she can be powder blue, sky blue, two shades of gray, deep blue, aqua, several shades of green, and there’s even a slight wash of lavender on her head—and then there’s the amber of her beak and tan of her eyes.

And when it comes to sounds, the natural ones a flock of my parrot makes in the wild vary widely and wildly (couldn't resist the pun--sorry). In fact, like most birds, the sounds change just like a dialect depending on the region. I chose a section of a spectrograph with ten different sets of waveforms—a lot of chatter and a few individual cries at the end of all the ruckus. The total audio sample that generates these ten waveforms is about 6 seconds long. The images below show part of the process of making this piece.

Third firing prep. The bottom section has been fired twice--once with black only and color on the 2nd firing. The top row is some of the overlay for the 3rd firing.

This is the layer of strips at the top of the previous image with frit on top placed over the bottom layer. I will trim all the edges with the tile saw.

Some of the challenges I encountered in this first prototype were learning how to manipulate the frit on the glass. Powders respond best to combing, while grades from fine on up just bunch up as they are moved, no matter the comb size. I tried different angles, glue and no glue to no avail. So I was pretty limited by the colors of power I had that would show some graphics--black, mostly, and a light bronze, which is faint. This brings me to another challenge--with powders, you usually need at least 3 times as much as you think you do, black being a welcome exception. Paint doesn't stick around through the firing cycle long enough. In the final firing result, the amber bar on the right was capped with some dark amber, but it's still a bit too yellow. Oh, well. This one's mine, anyway.

The final firing result.

I’ve contacted the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's McCauley Library to see if I may use their bird audio files and spectrograph images as the basis for upcoming bird projects—no need to start from scratch, and they have the world’s best library of sounds and photos . I see these potential pieces as both art and education. If I can turn more people into bird fans, the better.

Happy Fall, everyone. And yes, birds are now in their reverse migration.