Jim Rosenthal, Fine Artist
Works in Stone, Glass, Metal
Travel Photography and Painting
Pelagic Dreams - soft steel and fused glass
Celestial Dreams - steel,copper, glass
Mixed Media - Stone, Metal, Glass
​Snow Farm, the New England Craft Program (Snowfarm.org) is located on fifty beautiful acres in the rural foothills of the Berkshires. We teach over two hundred courses each year in a variety of artistic mediums. I have been involved with Snow Farm since 1996, and some years ago I was invited to design a course. Fascinated with the possibilities of joining together some different mediums into one project, I came up with a course “Glass Meets Metal”, combining welding soft steel and fused glass. Students produced a wide range of different projects. I cut a large fish from a steel sheet using an acetylene torch, added some cutout holes into which I inserted pieces of fused glass... scales. So my fish shines in both reflected light from the steel and with direct light through the glass. The class was fully enrolled so we offered it again the following year, and I made another large project, a sea dragon.
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The following year Snow Farm offered a welding class with Norman Ed as the instructor. Athough it was not billed as a glass meets metal class, the introductory materials stated that students would be able to access some of Snow Farm’s other studios in addition to welding. Our instructor, Norman, emphasized the process of designing a piece conceptually and through sketches before undertaking the process of executing it. I had used Betty Edward’s book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” to teach drawing to students, and now I used her book “Drawing From the Heart” to make a sketch inspired by the stars and sea of our Plymouth home. Creating the project involved shaping and welding soft steel, but I supplemented the piece with copper rings and blown glass discs within some of the copper rings. The result was “Celestial Dreams”.
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Also around this time I created a white marble sculpture with two “windows” which I thought would be good to fill with some fused glass. I approached Sam Meyers, a very creative glass artist who was also a Snow Farm instructor. I gave her the marble piece to ponder, and she came up with a brilliant solution to finishing the piece, with panels of beautiful glass containing flowing dark gray bands, and one in which she had centered a small piece of volcanic rock from Hawaii. I absolutely loved the result, and this project became the first of a series of collaborations I undertook with her.
Collaborations with Sam Meyers
Inner Light
Upstream
A World Afloat
Koi Inner Flame A World Within Octopus
Collaborations with Josh Simpson
Josh Simpson is a remarkable glass artist from Western Massachusetts. He is very innovative, creating different signature types of glass drawing on his knowledge of the chemistry of glass color. His work has appeared on exhibit around the world, and even into space!
I am quite fortunate to know Josh, and have had the opportunity to study with him and to create some collaborative pieces. One of the areas that Josh has pioneered is the creation of glass/copper vases. Working with Josh, I had the opportunity to explore sculptural glass in conjunction with copper and stone.
Tranquility Base Cosmic
Living under dazzling clear night skies in rural Western Massachusetts, and born of an age where he could watch the nascent NASA space program, Josh has a deep fascination with astronomy and outer space. When Frank Borman, commander of the Apollo 9 mission to orbit the moon snapped the famous photo of earthrise as seen from their command module, Josh was struck that with the proper perspective, earth looked like a beautiful blue marble suspended in a vast black sky. This thought triggered him to start a series of glass planets for which he has made quite a career.
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The first photo is Neil Armstrong's famous photo of Buzz Aldrin on the moon at Tranquility Base, into which I have photoshopped a photo of an alabaster astronaut with a copper mesh helmet into which Josh blew his blue New Mexico glass. Josh and his astronaut wife, Cady Coleman, have this astronaut in their home.
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The second photo is of another collaborative piece,"Cosmic" which incorporates a volcanic stone which supports a copper net - I was inspired by the curvature of space. Josh blew New Mexico blue glass into this piece also.
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