Oregon Art Beat; #103; Linda Ethier

Okay, that's like you're working for a second so you have to see your hand rest and okay, go ahead. Okay, go ahead. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay, go ahead. Great.

You know, I can... Why don't you just show me what that's going to look like. Okay. Okay, can you take it out? One more tuck, okay. Okay. Could you bring that last

thing on one more time to just take the cut out? Go ahead. Okay. Okay, go ahead now.

Okay. Let's fill it up. Okay.

Could you just come real close to my lens? Let's just work by real close by there. Maybe even lower, just so you just, yeah,

yeah. And we're coming through, that's great, thank you very much. Okay. Okay. Now what are you doing now? I'm making the outer shell for a piece so this will all get fired and all these colors will blend together kind of like this piece. And this will be the outside eventually of the piece that will slump down into the mold and then I'll be able to, in the final process, grind down through part of this so that I'll have some layers of color that will be partly revealed and partly ground away on the outer surface. And then this will be on the inner surface so you'll see through this to these leaves kind of like you can see there.

And there'll be more layers of the leaves in front of that. So this whole process of your goal here is to create that three dimensional depth. Exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of layering in these pieces. So there'll be some imagery, then some clear glass, then some imagery in front of that, and then some more clear glass and some more imagery in front of that little pieces. So there's a lot of atmosphere in the pieces. So from start to finish, from when you think of the idea until you are finished with a piece, how long does that take? It's at least a month, sometimes a month to six weeks, and I'll tend to work on more than one piece at once because it's efficient for me to make two or three of these at once and fire them in my kiln at one time. So I generally have, you know,

two to four pieces being worked on at the same time. But it's fair to say it's a month to do one of these. It's a long process so that if I'm working, for example, on four pieces, it takes about four months from start to finish. Wow. Yeah. You want me to leave it? What do we see in there? This is part of the outer shell of a piece, and what you're looking at here is what this will fire down into. And I layer up several colors on this so that at the very end I can grind away some of them. So some of the color you'll see and some of it will be actually have been removed. You'll be able to see this leaf through here quite clearly. So that from the back of the piece, you'll be able to see what's happening inside the piece as well as from the front of the piece.

I'm really working on it made mentionally. Actually, hold that up a little bit. Just show me again how you can still see the leaf. Well, when I grind down through this, you'll be able to see clearly through the leaf and then there'll be some of the color in the low sections. So be very modeled, very kind of mystical. Yeah, actually. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh. I hate it when that happens. I know. Sometimes I break their heads off. It depends on what I'm doing. Change heads. Change heads.

Change heads. Change heads.

Change heads. Change heads. Change heads.

Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads.

Change heads. Oh, yeah. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads.

Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads.

Change heads. Change heads. Yeah.

How do we get one? This is easier to set up. Yeah. Are they getting affordable? That's right here. That would be great. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads.

Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads.

Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change heads. Change

heads. Change heads. Change heads. Okay. You're good, you're good, Tom. This will be a good one for you to just tell me what you're doing as you're doing it. Okay. Okay. This is a rubber mold that I use to make multiples of these figures. So I make an original carving of the figure. And then I can pour wax into this rubber mold to duplicate the original. Okay. So then I can take these figures and change them, move the heads, change the position of the figures. This one, for example, I

cut apart so that I could change the whole posture, the piece. Mm -hmm. Now I can... actually do a little more on her arms. So in addition to being a glass artist, you essentially have to be a sculptor too. Oh, I'm definitely a sculptor, yeah. That's, you know, the glass is just the material that I use. And really the glass comes last because I work mostly in wax to do the actual sculpture parts, the images, and then those get translated into the glass for the light and the color. So did you start out as a glass artist to discover sculpture or did you start out as a sculptor who

discovered glass? I started out as a glass artist, yeah. But I always really liked the sculptural aspect of it. I started making glass in 1967, then it was mainly stained glass, and then I moved on to Tiffany lamps. And I was like, wow, this is great, I can make these curved forms. And then I started doing portraits, figurative, three -dimensional heads in Tiffany method, which was making little tiny bits of glass, leaded together. But then, but those were kind of fragmented looking. And then I started working with bending the glass and then moved into casting. But I've been doing quite a bit of casting since the early 80s. So your desire to make

the material, meaning glass, do more, fortunately coincided with Volzai and other people developing glass that could do. Yes. Yeah, my first pieces were all clear window glass. And then Volzai started making the fusible colors, and then I was able to start adding some color to the pieces. Can you just work our few inches so I get less to get more of that beautiful? Sure. Thank you. You said you fused glass. Is there an easy layman's term to explain what fused glass is?

Fusing is heating the glass up in the kiln so that it melts back together. So you can take two pieces of glass, put them in the kiln, and heat them up, and they become like honey, and they just melt back together. What is that enabled you to do that you couldn't do with leaded or foiled glass? Well, you can put the glass together with no lead lines, no black lines in between. So, and you can layer one color over another to get some mixing so that if you put, you know, like a blue color, and then layer it over with the green color, you could have, as the light comes through it, it's a blue green color. And it gives you just a lot of design potential. And then with the surface too, you know, by altering the glass will take the form of anything that it's sitting on. So if it's sitting on a mold that has a figure in it or the leaves in it, that's what it'll be.

So it just melts right into that form? Yeah, it just melts right in and then freezes that way. And why glass? I think these wax sculptures are quite nice. It'd be way easier if I stopped here. What I love is the transparency of the glass and the fact that I can layer up images and create whole worlds rather than just a surface, or rather like it's not going to be just this outside surface that you see, which is if this was like a bronze sculpture, this is what you'd see your eye would stop here. In these pieces, you see this, but then you also see what's beyond that. And from the front of this piece, you'll be able to see through and actually see these figures behind all the things that are happening in here. So it's a whole new

world of, you know, sort of inner secret place. Huh.