Salt Meadow Gallery features two distinct types of glass
artwork: blown glass and stained glass. David
McDermott and Yukimi Matsumoto of McDermott Glass Studio
create exquisite shapes, colors, and designs in their
hand blown glass vases, bowls, stemware, and accent
pieces. Gayle Olsson
collects stained glass from all over the world which
she assembles with foil and solder into light-catching
works of art that can be suspended in front of a window
or hung on a wall.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Stained Glass: Strictly speaking, stained
glass is glass that has been painted with silver stain
and then fired. Depending on its thickness, this stains
clear glass with a gold/yellow/brown color. This appears
most typically in the golden haloes depicted in church
windows. In general usage, stained glass refers to glass
that is colored by added metallic salts during its manufacture
to create a wide variety of colors. Early stained glass
artists were limited to a very few primary colors, but
today almost any color can be produced.
These colored glasses are available in many different
textures—smooth, wavy, rippled, hammered, pebbled,
or very rough. These different textures cause the glass
to have light and color transmission characteristics
that, even for the same color, can provide surprising
results.
In conventional stained glass work, glass of different
colors is cut into pieces, shaped by grinding, and then
assembled using zinc or lead cames or a copper foil
method. Read
More>
Glass Blowing: While the first evidence
of man-made glass occurs in Mesopotamia in the Late-Third/Early-Second
Millennium BCE, the actual "blowing" of glass
using a tube did not occur until sometime between 27
BC and AD 14 in Syria. This advancement transformed
the material's usefulness from a time-consuming process
in which the medium was hot-formed around rough cores
of mud and dung into a mass-producible material which
could be quickly inflated into large, leakproof vessels.
Glassblowing techniques spread throughout the Roman
world. Venice, particularly the island of Murano, became
a centre for high quality glass manufacture in the late
medieval period.
Traditionally, the glass was melted in furnaces from
the raw ingredients of sand, limestone, soda, potash
and other compounds. The transformation of raw materials
into glass takes place well above 2000°F (1400 K);
the glass is then left to "fine out" (allowing
the bubbles to rise out of the mass), and then the working
temperature is reduced in the furnace to around 2000°F.
"Soda-lime" glass remains somewhat plastic
and workable, however, as low as 1000°F. Read
More>
|
