Tag: Glass

Meet The Maker: Rebecca + Danielle of Remark Glass

Hi! This is Rebecca and Danielle from Remark Glass. We use bottle glass to make hand blown dinnerware, barware, and home furnishings.

Remark’s studio is located in the Bok building in South Philly. We’ve been working together alongside some close friends since 2015 to design and produce our recycled glass line of work.

We started working with bottle glass because it is an untapped resource, a unique design opportunity, and a sustainable and energy efficient way to accomplish our glass blowing dreams. Now we collect bottles from neighbors, friends, and local businesses to give them a new life as beautiful and functional everyday wares.

Our process is different than that of a typical glassblowing studio. First, we hand select what bottles we are transforming. They get de-labeled, cleaned, and often cut to a shorter height on a diamond saw depending on the final shape we are aiming to achieve. We pre-heat the glass in a kiln to make it malleable. Once it is “warm” (1050 degrees fahrenheit), we then pick up the bottle glass on the end of a steel rod or pipe to heat it further and transform it using traditional glassblowing techniques.

This process is used to take one bottle at a time up to 2000 degrees to spin it, blow air into it, and shape it with tools to shift the glass into its final form.

You can find our products online at remarkglass.com and at a lot of local events in Philadelphia. We’re excited to be joining Art Star at Sugarhouse in a couple weeks and look forward to meeting you there. Come find us in booth 23 and bring us some bottles if you’d like! In the meantime, follow us on Instagram @remarkglass and Facebook @remarkglass to see new designs fresh out of the oven and where you can find us for live demos and sales!

November 6, 2017
Meet the Maker: Scott Staats

My name is Scott Staats and I am a glass artist. I’ve been blowing glass for five years but I have spent whole my life creating art. I have always loved to create things and make art working with many different mediums, but once I started working with glass I knew I found the one for me. Glass instantly fascinated me, it can be used in so many ways to create nearly any shape and color, yet you can never touch it with your hands while working with it.

When I’m in the studio working with the glass it starts out as a liquid, at 2000 degrees fahrenheit, with the viscosity of honey and is gathered on the end of a metal blowpipe. All of the glass starts clear and then the color is added while it is still hot. Once the glass is colored it gets blown up and manipulated using a variety of traditional tools. When the piece is finished it placed in an annealer where it can cool to room temperature over a time span of 24 hours.

I am inspired to create by so many things I see around me. I have always been drawn to the random natural patterns and colors of nature and the scale and lines of urban cities. Drawing upon these inspirations I like to incorporate wood and steel into some of my work.

I like making art that people will enjoy, give as gifts and decorate their homes with. My products include seasonal decor, functional glass, installation art and custom lighting. I hope that my work brings joy to people’s lives like so many other artists work has brought to mine.

This will be my first year as a vendor at the Art Star Craft Bazaar and I am very excited. Please visit my website at www.ScottStaatsGlass.com and please visit me at corner booth #46. Thank you.

November 3, 2015
Upcoming Exhibition with Genevieve Geer of Le Puppet Regime

Le Puppet Regime by Genevieve Geer
Stained Glass Marionettes + Sculptures
“You Never Know Who’s Pulling The Strings”
February 13th – April 12th
Opening Reception: Friday, February 13th from 6-8pm

We are thrilled to announce a solo exhibition with Philadelphia artist, Genevieve Geer of Le Puppet Regime. Genevieve makes brilliant stained glass marionettes of tattooed showgirls, circus freaks, Siamese twins, mermaids, strong men, minotaurs and more. Each piece has movable limbs so you can contort and pose your puppet in any way you choose.

We first stumbled across Genevieve’s unique work after she applied for our 2014 May Art Star Craft Bazaar. We had never seen anything like it before and it isn’t often that we come across cool stained glass work! Her application definitely gave us goose bumps. We were even more smitten after checking out the work in person. Not only does she make marionettes, but she also makes larger sculptural wall pieces and a line of jewelry.

Her exhibition at Art Star will include her popular marionettes but also some more of her larger sculptural pieces. The show will differ a bit from our typical exhibition. Though the larger pieces will remain up throughout the duration of the show, the marionettes will be available to take home the day of purchase. We will have a back stock to replace pieces as they sell. The show will open the day before Valentine’s Day, so bring your date to check out the show, mix and mingle with the artist, enjoy a beer + snack and pick up a one-of-a-kind art piece for your special someone!

Artist Statement: Genevieve Geer’s stained glass characters are articulated, modern day people, captured in an ancient art. They are holy in their medium, hearkening back to saints and sinners in churches everywhere, but they are living contemporary tales. Instead of stained glass as static object, well placed, well lit, and coveted as an architectural asset, these pieces move themselves to center stage. By pulling the characters out of the allotted window frame, Geer begins to force a reassessment of this medium. Further, by articulating each creature and character, the audience can no longer dismiss the work as sparkly background noise. They must look at each piece and divine it’s story, what it is and where it comes from.

The Artist’s process is painstaking and involved. The first steps are drafting a basic line drawing on paper and transferring the cartoon to glass, using hand mixed powdered glass paint that is then kiln fired. Cutting the glass, coppering, soldering, drilling and piecing together the final figure allows for variations and deviations at every turn, often resulting in creatures that stray from the initial drawing by happy accident. “Powdered glass paint is a medium unlike any other–one can have a general idea of what it will do, but sometimes it’s better than me, it knows what will look best, and when that happens, if I am smart, I lift the brush quickly off the glass, let it dry and get it in the kiln.”

Geer is constantly feeding her work, researching embroidered textiles and antique dishware patterns, ukiyo-e woodblock prints, contemporary couture fashion, Russian movie propaganda posters, illuminated manuscripts, and contemporary illustrators like Yuko Shimizu.

ABOUT THE ARTIST Genevieve Geer is a Philadelphia based artist working in glass, metal, wood and textiles. Originally from Massachusetts, she attended Parsons School of Design for Illustration and The Museum School in Boston for Animation. She moved to NYC soon after graduating and worked as a freelance prop fabricator over the next few years. When she relocated to Philadelphia in 2007, she began to experiment with a new medium, hot glass. She started out as a manager of a local public access glass studio for a year before taking an apprenticeship at Wheaton Village in New Jersey. There she developed her blown glass skills, but was also introduced to casting, kiln forming and flat glass techniques. After two years she returned to Philly and she and her husband built a studio in their Kensington home. In 2012, after seeing a stained glass show by the artist Judith Schaecter in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, a spark was lit and Genevieve began to research and experiment with stained glass. In this one medium she found a meeting place for her training in illustration, animation and hot glass. Her company, Le Puppet Regime, came into being soon after, and features articulated, movable stained glass characters and scenes.

Visit http://www.genevievegeer.com/ for the artist’s full portfolio.
Find a selection of her work at our shop + on our website.

January 4, 2015
Spotlight on Penelope Rakov of Spot On Designs

Spot on Designs by Penelope Rakov

I met Penny back in the early 2000’s when I was working in the gallery at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia. She was a recent Alfred graduate who had studied both ceramics & glass, receiving her BFA in 2000. She was coming to Philly straight from an artist residency at Watershed, which provided her with studio space, a place to live, & covered basic expenses. She was looking to find a shared art community & studio space/time to continue to develop her ceramic & glass work. She volunteered in the gallery for me at The Clay Studio & also assisted our class studio technician in exchange for work space. Rakov states, “At the time, I was interested in making work that you live with. What I really loved about ceramics was how you interacted with it. I loved the simplicity of how something could just be beautiful & part of your daily life.” She worked on her pottery at The Clay Studio & also blew glass at Hot Soup (a glass studio/school in Philly) in exchange for teaching classes there.

ceramic cup by Penelope Rakov

Working in glass soon became too expensive & she felt her glass skills needed to develop further. According to Rakov, “At that point, I had never been as good in glass as I was in ceramics. So I applied to Tyler School of Art as a glass person w/ ceramic slides.” She was accepted in the glass department and paid for her tuition by teaching ceramic classes there. Her work at this time moved from being functional to more sculptural. She was only given 2 hours in the hot shop & the rest of the day she worked in her studio. She says, “I had not pulled cane [long strips of colored glass] before I got there. I loved color & I had intended on making functional glass objects in the same vain as making ceramic objects for the home. But it was just not as fun, or maybe I just was not as good at it. I also felt uncomfortable w/ all the judgment I was getting. When you blow glass, you fail a lot in public. Cane pulling wasn’t as hard for everybody & I could work w/ it. I could work w/ the scraps and build something out of it & make the color worth it. I could cut into it & fuze it back together & it could at least be interesting so [from there] I really just worked w/ pattern & color.”

She manipulated the pulled cane to create large color fields in a variety of forms. She states, “Color has a huge amount of information. If we look at red & green we think of Christmas; red and yellow -McDonalds. There are certain color combinations that have so much information, so I was thinking a lot about color combinations & what kind of information they conveyed. Conceptually I was thinking about things like lobster buoys, pharmaceuticals, etc. and how all those things are color coded so that they are instantly recognizable. I was playing w/ color combos & what I thought this combo would mean to me personally. So I made different fields of color, different forms of fields of color: some were flat, some were huge bundles, some were long troughs w/ scattered cane. Mostly what that was about for me was just having lots and lots of cane & being able to reassemble it and make something else out of it.” We asked if she was even thinking of making jewelry at the time. According to Penny, “I got requests for jewelry but I thought ‘how many crafts should I be making’. I was coming from an anti selling point at school & at the time, I bristled at the requests I got.”

Early Slice Necklace by Penelope Rakov

After graduating w/ her MFA, her thinking began to shift. In early 2004 we opened Art Star & Penny had recently finished up at Tyler & was beginning to sell her work. We consigned some small, brightly colored “pocket sculptures”, which were small circles of glass. Each piece was visually striking & unique. Each one was layered with circles & dots of different colored glass, some raised & bubbling from the surface. They were reminiscent of sea creatures or something you’d view under a microscope or find in a Petri dish. Customers were mesmerized by them & began to ask if the artist would make them into brooches or necklaces. We approached Penny about this & the seed for her soon to be small business, Spot On Designs, a production glass jewelry company, was planted. She recalls, “You said, ‘Penny, we’ll actually sell this & sell it for more money if you’d put a pin back on it.’ We watched as Penny’s glass pieces evolved from a chain passed through a hole in the glass sculpture to being professionally set in sterling silver. Today Spot On Designs creates not only necklaces, but also rings, earrings, & cuff links in a variety of styles, colors, patterns & settings. Because each piece is handmade, no two are alike.

Corey Dangle Earrings by Penelope Rakov

Penny’s studio is in the Crane building, an old plumbing warehouse that has been renovated to provide artist studio space & also houses the Icebox gallery space amongst others. Her walls & work tables are lined w/ hundreds of glass tubes in a vast array of colors. Her studio is where she starts to get creative with the glass canes that she has pulled & begins to play around w/ the colors to create patterns. She does this by bundling the glass strips together to see how they look. She says, “I will think of the colored canes that I’ve made & meditate on that, reacting to the stock that I have. I’ll mess around w/ the canes together & then bundle them. I’ll work w/ a specific color scheme that has been haunting me or that I think that I am missing from my collection or that I think will be popular with my customers”.

bundles of glass cane in Penny’s studio

click here to read how each pieces is made, step by step

We were both amazed at how many steps were involved in the making of one piece (at least 7 steps) & were curious how she keeps her pricing so affordable. Penny reassured us that though it is a long, complicated process, she doesn’t make each piece one at a time. The canes that she pulls in the hot shop will be used for many finished pieces. She might not use them all right away, but she stores them in her studio until she can find a piece that they work w/. None of her materials are wasted. She states, “I couldn’t retail them for a price people couldn’t pay. If these prices get me to the next level [in my business] then it is okay – I can always raise them later. I love my customers, I really do & I want them to think that they bought something very special that will not disappoint them.” Plus, it will keep her customers coming back. Seeing her jewelry on a happy customer is her favorite part. She recalls,“There was this woman last year at Artstcape that purchased a piece that honestly, I didn’t like very much. Once she put it on I was like, that’s gorgeous!” This is when Penny feels her work is finally finished.

Penny Candy Necklace, glass & sterling silver

You can find Penny’s work in galleries & shops across the country. Visit her website for a complete list of shops that stock her work. Penny also does around 12 craft shows each year, including our own Art Star Craft Bazaar. And of course, you can find her work at Art Star year round!

Penny & her dog

by Megan Brewster

July 26, 2011