Jim Rosenthal, Fine Artist
Works in Stone, Glass, Metal
Travel Photography and Painting
Glass -
Glass is an amazing material to work with, soft and fluid when heated in a furnace, fragile yet extremely durable at a wide range of temperatures. Also glass can be made in a full spectrum of colors, by melting in different metallic salts. Snow Farm, with its decades long close association with glass artist Josh Simpson, has recently updated its glass studios and offers courses in many forms of working glass such as blown glass, flame worked glass, kiln glass, and stained glass. I have been fortunate to have taken a number of different glass courses, and these are some of my resulting pieces.
Flame working technique - Penguins on an ice floe -
When visiting Antarctica it is amazing, and at times quite comical, to watch penguins as they hop out of the water onto an ice floe. In made these glass penguins by flame working - heating the tips of glass rods with a torch burning oxygen-propane. With the torch, the flame is highly adjustable in terms of heat, size, and intensity. By adjusting the angle you hold the rod, and by spinning slowly, gravity becomes your assistant in shaping the glass. You can also pull out forms, for example when shaping a beak, or flatten sections, for example to make the penguin able to stand.
The aqua blue ice floe is a piece of “volcanic glass” from Indonesia.
Sea Lion with a beach ball
Swimming dolphins
Both the dolphins and the sea lion were created by flameworking technique. The ocean base beneath the dolphins was made with furnace glass.
Glass three ways -
These three underwater scenes are each produced with a different flat glass technique - the koi by stained glass, the mermaid by glass on glass mosaic, and the three fish by fused glass.
Koi -
Working in stained glass, you choose sheets in the colors you wish to include in your finished piece. When I saw the sheet of orange glass, I jumped on it to cut pieces for a goldfish. Then the blues and greens seemed a good pick for a pond environment. Although the piece is abstract, it was nice to have a coherent color selection.
Mermaid with mirror -
Creating a mosaic piece, you start with multiple small pieces of glass (or ceramic) and attach each one individually. In this piece, I created the mermaid’s face (not well seen in this photo) and three small fish by flame working them. The smooth glass pieces on the bottom half of the piece are actual beach glass. The blue of the “ocean” is made of a blue sheet of glass that I ground up.
Fused glass fish -
My favorite of the flat glass techniques, fusing involves cutting out shapes of different colored glass, positioning and layering them, then placing the whole thing in a glass kiln and heating everything until the glass melts together. There are many subtle variations fused glass techniques that give the potential for many different, beautiful outcomes.
Fused glass - abstract dolphins
These dolphins are created with the fused glass technique, but this time adding a third layer, with some small cutout paper forms which burn out leaving bubbles in their place, perfect for the effect of an ocean.
