"Growing Love" - A Work in Progress

I became a fan of Renee Phillips of Manhattan Arts after reading her article about Vanity Galleries in Art Calendar Magazine last year. As a result, I purchased two of her books, Presentation Power Tools for Fine Artists and Success Now! I have read both and find Renees' advice invaluable. I also subscribe to her newsletter and a couple of weeks ago, there was a Call for Artists for their juried online gallery called Celebrate HerStory 2009. I wanted to share this with all of you, as I hope you will consider entering your works too. As I read about Celebrate HerStory 2009, I knew I wanted to enter something and I had a vision of what I wanted to create.

So, here is the start of my work for this entry, which I think I will call "Growing Love". It symbolizes how our love grows during the course of our lives. The love we have for our parents, our husband/wife/significant other, our children (if we have them), our friends, our pets....well, you get the idea.

It seems that many of you enjoy seeing my work in progress and I thought I would continue with that for this piece.

The picture at the top of this post is how "Growing Love" looked after it was fused. It seems to me like this represents some of that earthy, organic look and feel my work tends to have. The straight lines sort of moved and became more wavy as the hearts fused into them. This is a bit of a fantasy of how hearts grow and what a plant or bouquet of them might look like.

This is a shot of the glass I choose, Bullseye of course, which for me has such wonderful color pallets. The top red/white streaky glass, is the one I have used for my Symbols of Love jewelry and it fuses to such a rich color. I also used white, another pink, and some pink streamers in clear.




Then its time to start cutting the strips. I decided to make them 3/8" and as so many of us love the tools of our respective trades, I couldn't resist showing my trusty Beetle Bits cutting system. A very handy tool for the glass artist. You can see how this cutting system lets me set up the width I want to cut. The yellow and orange guides to the right are positioned to hold the glass in place at the correct distance. The little 'beetle' cutting tool is at the bottom of this picture and it is set on the black guide, running a perfect score at the correct width.




The end result is an assortment of glass strips that I played with for a while until I got the color combination/layout that I wanted.







This shows all the colors arranged in a 9" square. Ultimately, I felt it was better to keep the background fairly ordered and clean to act as the proper stage for the 'heart shaped flowers'.







Next I started working on the hearts. There are three hearts, but each is made up of 5 layers of glass, each layer/heart is just a little bit smaller than the one it sits on.









And then I placed the hearts on top of the glass strip base. At first I used the green stringers like plant stems starting at the bottom of the piece, but as I looked at it...I felt it should be a little more mystical. I changed it to have the green stringers coming from the top. Like someone was holding them and the heart bouquet was coming down from an imaginary sky.




Here is a side view showing the height of everything before the fusing took place.







And the last shot is a detail view of the 'flowers' after the fusing. I added one last stringer as the center of each flower.

On to the coldworking phase, which should be minimal for this piece. I will wait for my new machine to complete that aspect of the work.


Hope you enjoyed this work in progress. And I hope all of you consider a submission to Celebrate HerStory 2009. Oh yes, I hope my piece will be accepted...if not, I sure had fun creating it. :)