Why glass?

Hello and thank you for making it to my blog!

My goal with this blog is to give you a little more background information, through which I’m hoping you’ll gain deeper understanding and appreciation of my work.

Today I will talk about why and how I started using glass as my canvas.

I started painting on glass by chance mostly. When I was at Wimbledon Art Studios, a fellow artist was having a studio clear out. I purchased a few large sheets of perspex from her to experiment on.

As my style was quite sparse at the time (and still is), I thought my paintings would work well on a transparent surface. Thus started a series of trial and error. From perspex I moved on to glass and after discussing framing options with my framer, I decided to go for museum glass which is non reflective (so almost no reflections at all visible on the glass which makes it look like it’s barely there). I love the effect, my animals look like they are floating in mid-air, ethereal, in a world of their own.

Thus was born The Glass Menagerie, the title of the series just popped in my head and I knew I had to start this collection. I painted several animals on large panels of glass and had each of them custom framed. Each piece is painted across two or more layers of glass which are spaced out within the frame, giving the piece a 3D effect.

These are fairly large pieces; I’ve also created a series of much smaller paintings also on glass frames. I call this series The Mini Menagerie.

What I love most about glass is its smoothness, feeling the paintbrush slide across the surface is wonderful. I like painting in long, loose stokes so a smooth surface is key. Also, as mentioned, the style of my work lends itself beautifully to the transparent material.

The painted subject appears with no background so looks like it’s hovering on the glass.

In a nutshell that’s how the glass work started. Hope you enjoyed this blog post! I will aim to release a post once a month so stay tuned!