University of Alberta CCIS Video
September 21, 2011
My terrazzo design for the University of Alberta is highlighted in this video, starting at about 1:25.
Comments (0) | Tags: Public Art, terrazzo
Gloria Dei Glass Installation Almost Complete
June 16, 2011
Gloria Dei installation by City Glass glaziers of Sioux Falls and assisted by Tim O’Neil.
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Ecclesiastical Painting in Germany
March 26, 2011
My second trip to Germany at Derix Glasstudios in Taunusstein. This is truly a glorious, magical place where one’s spirit is renewed in the presence of great artists while working intensely with color, energy and light. The alchemy of fire fusing molten silica with metallic salts, oxides and pigments produces translucent hues of color and opalescent glints of material so beautiful, oceanic and sublime that stained glass has stood at the heart of what is transcendent and numinous in Western civilization for more than one-thousand years.
Derix master painter Olaf Hanweg and I are creating 24 stained glass panels for the new Gloria Dei ELCA Lutheran Church in Sioux Falls. The baptismal panel above has been fired three times at this viewing and will probably be fired two more times yet. Many, many thanks to Barbara Derix and Karl-Heinz Traut, and the congregation and staff of Gloria Dei.
Pictured below, I am working on the Lamb of God altar panel.
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CCIS Terrazzo work almost finished
December 17, 2010
The main CCIS E–W hallway nears completion in snowy Edmonton. Merry Christmas!
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Staining Glass
October 30, 2010
I spent this week at Derix Glasstudios in Taunusstein, Germany, developing production techniques with Barbara Derix and Rahmi Schulz that will be employed in an upcoming ecclesiastical glass commission of mine. The experience was remarkable in so many ways, including being at a world-class glass studio and meeting glass artists Karl Heinz Traut, Stuart Low, Oscar Galvez, Brigid O’Malley, Karl-Martin Hartmann and Johannes Schreiter. Dr. Schreiter was working on a set of windows for the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Heidelberg, Germany. He saw our test panels and said they were right on. Wow!
It doesn’t get any better for an artist than playing directly with color and light. The photograph below shows what glass looks like after you paint it with silver stain (silver-nitrate) and fire it in the kiln. This technique comes from the fourteenth century and produces a range of luminous warm colors from transparent pale yellows to deep ambers. The silver actually enters the glass, staining the glass, and is so beautiful in the way the color holds the sunlight within.
Comments (0) | Tags: architectural glass, ecclesiastical glass
Isenheim Altarpiece
October 28, 2010
Fulfilling a 25-year dream, I drove with two friends to Colmar, France to visit the Unterlinden Museum and see Matthias Grünewald’s compelling altarpiece from the early 1500s. My undergraduate painting professor Jay Olson first described this painting to me as the most genuine statement of faith an artist had ever painted. It was always his dream to one day see it. John Berger writes in Keeping a Rendezvous about the consequential brutality of this altarpiece as opposed to most Renaissance art which idealizes the body and reduces violence to a romantic gesture like in a John Wayne or Gary Cooper western movie. With grace and honesty, this work does speak to grevious suffering, redemption and the human condition. The skin of Christ and the gestural emotion conveyed in his hands and feet is so exceptional and direct, that you recognize this is where the immanent does meet the transcendent in paint on canvas.
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Walking with Giants
July 21, 2010
I was in Denver last week and stopped by the Tattered Cover bookstore on east Colfax Avenue. To my great surprise and delight, two books were featured on the table in front of the Art section. The first was by my favorite writer on art, John Berger, and his classic Ways of Seeing, the other was The Lure of the Local by Lucy Lippard which has an art installation of mine featured in it! I can’t believe I was displayed there next to John Berger and with Lucy Lippard, two giants indeed!
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Beyond Belief
June 11, 2010
Beyond Belief: Theoaesthetics of Just Old-Time Religion? has just been published by Pickwick. I have a chapter in this book which I co-authored with Dr. David O’Hara and based on a course we teach together at Augustana College entitled “Visual Culture and the Sacred: Creative Acts of Resistance and Redemption in Art, Film, and New Media.” Another chapter is by Dan Siedell, who should be read if you are interested in the intersection of liturgy, religion, and art.
