Hi,

I will be speaking to the Senior Artist Alliance on April 30 at Davis Library on Democracy Road.  

 

I have been working as a librarian for the past 24 years, 19 of them at Darnestown Elementary School.  This June I will be retiring.  When I grew up, I was surrounded by art - my parents loved it, and we went to museums, but I had no formal training in art at all.  My mother painted and took art classes, but she didn't do that until I was in my teens.  When I went to college (Penn State), I majored in Russian with a minor in French.  Again, no art.  But I still liked it.

 

I had always been a sewer (or seamstress, I guess).  Both my grandmothers and my mother sewed, so when I had children, I spent a lot of time making clothes for the family and making fabric collages for them to hang on their walls.  When they were a little older, I took a class in batik and became really interested in it.  I even taught it several times.  And of course, I made batik hangings as gifts for all my family and friends, even if they weren't as excited about it as I was.  I made all the window treatments for our home and got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

 

But when my son was four, I met a someone whose son was in my son's preschool class.  We really hit it off, and when she asked if I would be interested in taking a stained glass class, I said yes.  That was 31 years ago.  We are still friends, and I am still working in glass.  I took many classes after that one, first from Tony Glander at Glass Fantasies in Gaithersburg and from Nancy Weisser in Kensington.  They are both well known now in the field of glass, and in fact, I still take classes at Nancy's studio in Kensington when there's something I want to learn more about.  I have taken lessons from many really well-known glass artists and have learned much from each of them.  I joined what was then the Metropolitan Stained Glass Guild, which later became the National Capital Art Glass Guild, many of whose members are nationally and internationally known.  Some of them teach at Corning and other well-known places.  Since I had no training in art or drawing, I signed up to take a drawing class at the Smithsonian.  It was a great thing to do because it gave me confidence.

 

Perhaps 10 years ago, I joined ArtSites, the guild for Judaic Art.  Judaism plays a large part in my life, and some of my large pieces of stained glass are from the Bible.

I didn't stay completely in stained glass, although I continue to work in that medium.  I moved into fused glass as so many glass artists did, and have been working in fused glass for quite a while.  I have even blown glass and enjoyed it, but it is much less forgiving than fused glass.

 

I show my glass through these two guilds that I belong to and from word of mouth and my website.  I hope you will enjoy looking at some of my work.