Seeing differently: coloured glass

I’ve been reflecting* on this quite a bit recently, sparked by reading Jane Brocket’s interesting blog posts about stained glass.  The colours are gorgeous, and always arresting.  There’s something jewel-like that captures my eye.

In fact as I look around my house and garden I see there’s coloured glass everywhere.  Some while back we used to have glass shelves across a kitchen window to display some of it.  That went years ago, but the glass remained.  Mostly things I have picked up in charity shops or been given, and a few painted by oldest son when he was very young.

Painted by oldest son as a child

Christmas gift from and made by Deborah Godshaw

Made by oldest son, after Matisse

Until her untimely death last September, we had a very talented and creative friend who for many years worked in glass – first stained glass, then she began making fused glass pieces.  She  also taught workshops, and one year I arranged a fused glass workshop for me, oldest son and daughter-out-law as a joint birthday present.  First she taught us some techniques and we practised cutting glass, then she let us loose to play.And play we did.  I made a square platter, and then a few smaller pieces using scrap pieces of glass.  Oldest son, who is himself a talented artist, made a number of hanging pieces, including a freehand copy of a Matisse blue woman.

Made by me at Deborah Godshaw’s workshop

I look up as I type this and see 4 coloured glass pieces pinned to my noticeboard; one of the scrap pieces I made on the window ledge.  I’m wearing some colourful glass beads I bought in Italy, and hanging on the noticeboard is another glass necklace bought by that same friend in Venice, and left to me when she died.  She’d remembered how much I liked it, with its tiny pieces of millefiori fused into glass beads and so many zingy colours.  I wear it often, though not as often as I think of her and miss her.

Venetian mille fiori glass beads

There’s more coloured glass in the garden, hanging from the tree, in a summerhouse window, a stained glass window salvaged when we replaced it with a double-glazed unit (waiting until the moment is right for it to be transformed into some kind of garden sculpture).

And then I walked into a  somber-looking church in a Black Forest town (Oberkirch) and saw these:

The colours flooded the space, and my heart sang.

 

* I know, the pun just kind of came.  As they do.