 |
 The
Winner of the Claude Monet Challenge, our
Spring 2003 Bead
O'The Quarter by
Lisa St. Martin
My
Monet bead was done while I was teaching a five-day workshop with
high school students at Tandem Friends School
in Charlottesville,
Virginia. The art teachers at Tandem had taken classes from me
before and they asked if I would be interested in coming to their
school to teach glass beadmaking during "Emphasis Week". For a week
each spring, students can choose one of many different
subjects to concentrate on for a week. These vary among studying in Europe to rock climbing, from flight to kayaking.
Naturally I agreed to come! My class consisted of eight students (and the high school art
teacher) all on torches. I had a wonderful time. The
students were friendly, polite and eager to be working. The
classroom was beautiful - enough to make any old art teacher like
me suffer from a case of classroom envy. Pru, the art
teacher was great fun to work with. I hope we'll do it again.
(See pictures of Lisa's workshop at Tandem Friends
School. We are hoping
that all of them keep making beads!)
The
weather was cold and rainy all week but we kept warm around the
torches. The kids helped me choose a good
Monet painting to work from for my bead. I pulled a lot of
stringers in all the opaque greens, yellows and oranges. I pulled a few blue and gray transparents for the
sky, incidentally demonstrating to my students that stringers are used for more than dots. All
the glass
is Moretti.
How the bead was made: The core of the bead is clear. Then I
cased it in three sections. The top third was cased in white,
working very hot so that I got a thin wispy swirl of white for the
sky. The middle was cased in a bright opaque limy green color.
The bottom section was cased in a darker opaque green. After
shaping, I started to do my stringer work. I added
transparent blue and gray to the white in small amounts. I
only wanted these colors to accent and bring depth to the sky.
After heating the stringer in flat, I swirled (or marbleized) the
colors into the white, blending in the colors. To the middle
and bottom green sections, I added dots and slashed of
the other opaque greens for texture and to blend the sky into the
foreground. Then I used a little of other opaque colors
such as periwinkle, mauve and sky blue to represent flowers etc.
The final layer was done by adding stringer work in the warm
colors to represent the trees. I debated casing the whole
bead in clear, but decided not to since Monet's work seems to be
done with such flat true opaque colors with little glazing to add transparent depth.
It
was fun working in a very different style than is my usual.
It sets the mind percolating. The challenge worked for me
because it forced me to work outside my comfort zone and try new
things. I'm looking forward to our next Challenge.
Lisa St. Martin
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