Glass artist: Wendy Talaro
September 28, 2009 by Cyndi Lavin
Filed under Lampwork & Fused Glass, Make Art Monday, Other Bead & Jewelry Sites
There is so much that can be learned from artists who work outside the realm of jewelry. In the case of Wendy Talaro, she has graciously offered to share her expertise in glass fusing with us! Have you ever wanted to try fusing, but weren’t sure quite how to begin? Wendy has demystified the process for us. Today, I want to introduce you to Wendy’s work, and tomorrow for Technique Tuesday, Wendy has written a tutorial on glass fusing that I know you’re going to want to see!
Glass artist: Wendy Talaro
Website: Fawkes Artglass
Wendy writes:
The 9 1/2″ x 9 1/2″ slumped pastel plate is a prototype from a series titled “Spring Celebration”. (There’s a companion plate with a similar pastel palette but in blue and green.) The detail shot shows the dichroic accents across the plate and in the corners. The dichroic accents in the center of the plate were prefused onto 1/8″ thick pastel Bullseye glass, which was then cut, into 3/4″ squares, and fused onto a piece of 1/16″ iridized Bullseye glass. The dichroic accents in the corners used prefused strips of alternating colors that were bandsaw cut crosswise, ground, assembled and fused into 1 1/4″ squares. The 1/4″ color strips along the edges had to be precision ground for fit. The slumping form for the black and iridized white 9 1/4″ x 9 1/4″ shallow checkerboard bowl (shown below) was a light fixture cover, believe it or not.
The surface tension of glass is such that it will naturally pull itself into rounded forms until viscosity overcomes surface tension. At that point, glass, like water, will fill up corners as it flows. My peak kiln temperatures never exceeds 1450 degrees F, so keeping lines crisp and clearly defined is challenging. I use the kiss fit edges of the pre-fired pieces in assemblage to constrain the flow of adjacent pieces. In other instances, I use weights on top of the glass to force adjacent pieces to flow into each other, thereby achieving the same effect with pieces of much smaller mass, i.e. 1/16″ adjacent to 1/16″ pieces.
