Artists I admire.

 I needed to do some research for my Metamorphosis project, and whilst doing so I recalled a couple of artists whose work I admire and found a new one...

I will start with the new one... Frank Thompson.

Frank works in fused glass and his pieces are amazing!  I might have to save up to have one for myself.

Frank lives in LA in the USA and he works with glass and metal to create 2D and 3D wall art. He is self-taught and his work is quite abstract, but with lots of movement and a beautifully flowing style.

I have picked three pictures to show you, but it was incredibly hard to narrow my choice down as I love so much of his work.

Above is the 'Odyssey Series'. Frank designed this piece (or pieces) to represent an odyssey or a journey.  Each one is beautiful in it's own right as a stand alone piece, but I think the five together work wonderfully.  I wonder if, personally, I would have to rearrange the panels in a more rainbow spectrum  way.

Another piece that caught my eye was this one. It is called 'Tropical Delight' and to me this looks like long elegant leaves blowing in wind. The use of dichroic - which is a special glass that reflects other colours - would make this piece look very different depending on which direction you viewed it from.  It is hard to catch the beauty of this glass in a photograph.

Another glass artist that I have admired for a long long time is Loren Stump. 

Loren started as a stained glass artist, moving on to Lampwork, even creating his own range of tools - some of which I own and use.

When my own personal journey with glass began around 2004 I very much relied on books and my own mistakes to learn from, so when during the Glass Biennale of 2006 Loren came over to Stourbridge, UK from the USA to do some demonstrations, I knew I had to go and see him. I was lucky enough to be able to watch him work up close.

He completely blew me away by creating a glass flower on his Lampwork torch. Not content with that, he then went on to make a bee to sit upon that flower.  As he created this tiny little bee with such magnificent detail all I could do was stand and stare in complete awe.  The moment he then decided to put hairs on the legs of the bee was the moment I wanted to become a glass artist as good as him.

The detail in his glass work is simply phenomenal.

The next artist I would like to share with you is quite local to me, Julie Dumbarton.   

Julie's studio is about 40 minutes away in Langholm, and I have been to visit. It is a fabulous studio in an old church, with hundreds of half used paint tubes laying about on a huge table in the middle of the room.  That, in itself, (whether deliberate or accidental)  is a piece of art worth seeing!

I own a large print of one of Julie's pieces, I knew exactly which one I wanted when I travelled there to buy it, yet came home with a completely different one!  It's funny how different things can look in real life after viewing them on the internet.  There is nothing quite like seeing art 'in the flesh' so to speak.

The piece I own (above) is called Bluebell wood. I love the use of colour in art and this painting has got plenty of that. I was redecorating my living room and I based the whole colour scheme around this painting.

Julie's use of colour inspires me so much that I have signed up for one of her online painting courses.  I have never painted in my life.... unless you count slapping paint about on a sheet of paper at the age of four, so this is a totally new skill for me to embrace.

At the end of the course I hope to come out with something that vaguely resembles this..

We shall see!

I hope you have enjoyed my little snippets of these wonderful artists, and please do use the links to go and find out more about them - just click on their names.