Design of the Month · April 2008

"Tuscan Day"

I started with glass in the late 1980s by taking a stained glass course offered at the Redstone Arsenal, a U.S. Army post near Huntsville, Alabama. Before this I was mainly drawing and painting.
I enjoyed making my first panel: a duck. In the late 1990s I purchased the The Glass Eye but didn't do much with it at first. I played around with designing, but was too hardheaded to read the directions!

A couple of years later I was recovering from a lower back fusion, and because I couldn't move much I decided to print the tutorial and work with the software until I mastered it. To this day I have health issues that prevent me from actually cutting glass, but with luck I'll be back in the studio soon.

Two years ago my younger sister wanted me to design a window for her kitchen. She had purchased a stained glass lamp and wanted me to design a window to match. It was a hideous thing with "lollypop" trees, brown wine glasses, peach-colored grapes, and lots of tan and cream colors. I thought up a design representing an ideal lunch in Tuscany as if seated on a porch looking out onto fields of newly planted grapes. With each new design iteration I concentrated on what I thought the viewer's eye would be drawn to. The cheese was always there, and with it I tried grapes, crackers, then finally the apples. I spent more than a month designing it, and then my sister changed her mind, wanting a simpler design. Sadly, the design was never constructed. The original design was 28" x 32". Of course, with Glass Eye 2000 it can be any size at all.

My other sister does journal quilting, and I have used Glass Eye 2000 to create designs for her. It's a lot like stained glass, but with fabric. She sends me an image of a design she wants and I use Glass Eye 2000 to draw it. I email the design to her and then she digitizes it for her sewing machine to sew out. Glass and fabric can be almost the same in color, but when the sun shines through the glass you know that fabric can't compete!

~ Barbara Hill

About the artist

Barbara started with glass by reading all the books and magazines she could find. Her collection of issues of Glass Quarterly dates back to the late 1980s, with each issue providing great inspiration. She did not construct her earliest designs, but either kept them as drawings or gave them to her mother to construct. Her preference is for copper foil designs, but she has also studied engraving and reverse painting. You may contact Barbara by email.

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