Search Results for: thal

You need a strong foundation of skills and a plan when creating a piece of glass. Like having a blueprint; it’s important to have a direction when you first gather molten glass. There are moments when the material takes you in a new direction that can be fortuitous or can ruin the piece.

I love creating both functional and sculptural glass pieces. Lately I have worked on exciting architectural fused glass, custom hanging lights, sconces and room dividers.

Living in Jackson, I am surrounded by beauty, so my work is inherently beautiful. I love it when people say that owning my work, having it in their homes, passing it every day in different light, gives them joy. If I can add to the beauty of their life, that’s all I can ask.

www.thalglass.com

Tempo and Heat

In the picture at the top of this page, I’m flattening the bottom of what will be a vase. Above, I’m pulling the lip of a candleholder to lengthen it while the glass is still pliable. With glass blowing, you have to heat and reheat and shape the glass, as it cools quickly.

I first became interested in sculpture some 20 years ago. Recently, though, I’ve become frustrated with the lengthy process—from the clay original, to the wax replica, to the foundry, to the final bronze piece. This can sometimes take years, so I switched to woodcarvings. It moves along at a faster pace and is a process in which I’m fully involved.

During this time, I also became interested in old film cameras, negatives and working in the darkroom. Somehow that all gelled—the darkroom and the carving—to become my current interest: woodcuts. It makes perfect sense (at least for now). I get to carve my own negatives.

From my perspective, art is a process, a technical process. It requires the same analysis that I use when troubleshooting a computer problem. Well, maybe that’s simply called trial and error, but hopefully, I’ve achieved what I set out to do.

www.glennronning.com

Bronzes

“Balance” is one of my favorite sculptures. It’s got that whole man/woman, push/pull dynamic going for it. A bronzed family dog sits nearby along with stacks of Polaroids.

Each of the mediums I work with—encaustics, oils, pastels—is valuable to me. If I get stuck when I’m working with oils, say, I can switch to encaustic. Anything goes with encaustic—colors, intensities, collage, drawing, adding layers or subtracting—and often I can work myself out of the box I seem to be stuck in.

My favorite subject is the female figure, where I can kind of lose the edges and get more into the colors, textures and shapes. Faces and hands often dominate my work, directing the eye to other shapes like Klimt-inspired patterns on the clothing.

Through art I find that I’m a keener observer of my world. I’m always entranced to learn what it is that others see in an object. Design, colors, patterns in nature—art has given me another way of seeing the world. In Jackson, out of this enormous landscape, it can be one gorgeous tree limb in a certain light that grabs my attention.

www.peggyprugh.com

Easel

This is called a French Mistress palette; it folds up and preserves the oil paints for a longer time in our dry climate. The piece on the easel is called “The Conversation,” the first in a series of inanimate pears doing something very human.