About the materials

Almost all of the materials I use are made from glass, and many are handmade in either Italy or the US. I hand cut each piece and press them one by one into cement, which I often color with pigments. Small pieces (such as in my works titled "Clarity" and "Confusion") are placed one by one into cement using tweezers. One might say it takes "the patience of a saint" to work this way, but I don't take any short-cuts by dumping pieces en masse into cement. Rather, I choose which side of each piece of glass is facing up.

Below is a brief explanation of some of the specialty glass I use.

Smalti / Smalto

(Smalto, singular; smalti, plural). Smalti is handmade colored, enamelled glass as used by the Byzantines. Smalti is produced in cakes about 1 cm thick and 27 cm in diameter and then hand cut into tiles by cutting the cake into successive halves. Smalti is used with the cut sides as the face, emphasizing its rippled surface, which reflects light softly. There are often tiny air bubbles in the glass, which also play with the light. The beauty to smalti lies in its irregularity as the colors are often streaky throughout the glass.

Gold smalti
Three or more leaves of gold leaf are fused between two layers of glass and then cut down to size using a chopping machine or an old-fashioned glass hammer and hardie. The color of gold is partially determined by how many leaves of gold are used and by the color of the glass backing. The gold must be pure otherwise any impurities will appear during the fusing process. I use both 6K white gold as well as 24K yellow gold.

Millefiori

Literally, “thousands of flowers,” millefiore are beautifully colored, tiny glass rods containing patterns, which resemble flowers. Made in Murano, Italy, millefiori are made in the form of thick glass rods, which are then stretched into very thin rods before being hand cut into small pieces. Millefiori can be made in a variety of patterns in transparent, semi-transparent, or opaque glass.

Art glass
The glass I use is handmade and varies in texture, color, and opacity.

Dichroic glass

(Di meaning two and chroic meaning color). This glass comes from the US and is made by coating handmade float glass with multiple thin film layers of metallic oxides that transmit certain light wavelengths while reflecting others. This gives a special effect - the glass appears to be one color when viewed from one angle yet appears to be another color when viewed from a different angle.