It’s tough to imagine art being created out of glass. It is beautiful, hard, inflexible yet fragile. Yet creative glass artists and craftspersons work with it to create both humble, everyday objects as well as masterpieces with it.
Glass Art – which is also known as Art Glass is about crafting modern art pieces. Artists design and make their own pieces as fine art. Studio Glass is another term often used for modern glass made for artistic purposes. Glass Art has grown in popularity in recent years with many artists becoming famous for their work; and, as a result, more colleges are offering courses in glass work.
Glass Art consists of items made for decoration, for utility and are often combined with other materials. The simplest technique used to create glass art is to paint it. Much like the way our artistic partner Chitraankit does.
Other techniques include Glass Fusing – which is what Ikroop Dhillon uses to create her stylish, minimalistic art. The technique of using copper foil is mainly used in the construction of smaller pieces such as Tiffany style lamps as is done by Sonia’s Glass Studio. It consists of wrapping cut sections of glass in a self-adhesive tape that is made out of thin copper foil. This technique requires a great deal of dexterity and is also very time-consuming. After the sections have been foiled, they are soldered together in order to form the lamp.
Eta Jewels also works with tiny pieces of glass and fuses them on a base to create exquisite ethnic jewellery in bright tones. Then there is Mosaic Art that our partner artist Mosaic by renu specialises in. She creates images by assembling small pieces of coloured glass in different colors to create a finished image.
The work of Light-Fish involves the use of sand-blasting – wherein glass is decorated by sandblasting the surface of a piece in order to remove a layer of glass, thereby making a design stand out. Mix the glass with metal and wood around an LED light and there you have a soft, gentle, light effect.
And finally there is the very popular technique of glass blowing where the artist makes glass from scratch – using raw material in a furnace. The resulting product which looks like thick honey is blown at through a glass pipe to create different shapes. Or else the liquid glass is poured into a mould to create art in desired shapes. Glass blowing is a technique used extensively by Sachi’s due to the infinite opportunity for creativity and variation available at almost every stage of the process.
We’re still beginning to learn about the myriad ways in which glass is formed and Glass Art is created. But it’s simpler and more enjoyable for us to sit back and appreciate the efforts of our artists’ amazing creativity and technique !