The Vessel Series: Translucence and Opacity

How to satisfy the desire for the shine of glass without the glass? The objects I have been making this fall illustrate my efforts to satisfy this need. I have been experimenting with adding an underlayer of resin to my vessels. Sometimes I add pigment, mica flakes or pearls to the pour.

Some of the images in this recent series were found at the bottom of a dusty pile on a leafy street in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. I must have worn my artistic fervor on my sleeve as I set to the task of looking through endless baskets of cabinet cards. All of a sudden a chair was procured for me by a formidable ruddy fellow as I searched for my special image, the one that set me to dreaming. Of course it was at the bottom of the stack. With eyes defiant she glared at me in sepia.

I am also incorporating some small found objects in my recent pieces. An artist friend gives me strange bags of rusty items from time to time. What were these things in life? My most ambitious use of one of these findings is in my piece "Reliquary 1", shown below. If you look closely in some of the niches you might need a good glass of vin rouge.

An empty can becomes a portal, a vessel, a world, an inheritance.

Handle the materials until they become something else,

something beyond image and tin.

Make one piece. Make another one.

Work it until you have burnished the thing inside yourself

that makes the best of you surface

and then disappear as the work tells the story.

Let the thing burn clean.

Give it the freedom to be a little different every time.

Build a new lineage and let the thrill of it run through you.