Oregon Art Beat; #103; Linda Ethier

So they were, well look at that cool, almost, uh, what do you call it, holography. If you want it, I guess the variation would ask

before it, does it matter how you fill up that space with a glass, and for how it's going to look in the end? Yes, it does, the tighter I get this packed, the clearer it's going to be. But all these little cracks I also use as a design element in the piece. So in a minute here when I get this just a little bit farther along, I'll put some frid in and then add some color to it. So it's going

to look like this. What's that piece called? Which piece? When you're working on it. The title of it? I haven't titled this one yet. Is this one for commissioners or is this something that you're doing for yourself? This is for the galleries. This is a gallery piece. Where can you show your work? In Portland I show it with the Margot Jacobson gallery. And I also show and galleries in Hawaii and Chicago and Texas. This is a gallery piece.

This is a gallery piece. This is a gallery piece. So if

you filled the whole thing with frid, it would be expensive but you would make it less. Of the glass, the less clear it is because there's more air space in between. So that's one of the things that I use as a design element. And I assume that you have to go to a temperature that's hot enough to make it all huge but not hot enough fitted. And it gets to the temperature of the furnaces that bullside usually where it all just becomes a molten mass. Right, they're manufacturing the glass at a hotter temperature and I'm working about 1 ,500 degrees. Yeah. The fact that I hadn't even thought I would have thought it would have known right away is that when you go to the bullside glass factory all the glasses aren't. So it runs through that in the evening. Right.

It's all the same color. 2 ,200 or whatever it is. Yeah. It's all large. Oh, let's see. Stand back. And this will create a web -like pattern. And the piece, so there'll just be this faint sort of halo around these pieces where I put this. Really small for

it. So what is the purpose of this rip? The small for it creates like a little halo around the pieces. So you get a very sort of ethereal veil. Jeff, are you going to use these questions on camera? Do you want me to boom you as well? I don't think so. How did you learn to do this? Well, this particular part of the process is I just kind of made up myself as I went along. You know, as I needed to do something, I sort of figured it

out through trial and error and talking with other people. What do you get your ideas for your pieces? Well, a lot of them are kind of elaborations of imagery that I've been working with, not basically my whole life. And a lot of them sort of hark back to a sort of mythology, more ancient kind of pieces, and then like where do those carry forward in our psyche, because it's all still floating around out there. So I think a lot of them are not like dreams exactly, but fantasy archetypal images.

Yeah, I get a mythology and a little bit of a religious feel to me. I think they do have that spiritual over time. It's not any specific religion, but definitely their soul pieces. So there's a lot more, well, they're made to be sort of contemplated. And that's one of the things I like about layering up the images, because they're sort of there and not there. And as you look at the piece from different angles, you know, it's a very different piece. If you look at it from the front, it's kind of one scene, and then the back is something totally different. One of the things I was noticing on one of the pieces of the flat piece, I think, is that when I look on it absolutely straight, it looks almost perfectly clear. But when I go off to an angle, then

colors come into the glass. Well, that's partly the way the glass is layered up in the piece. But it also sort of adds to the mystery of the piece, that piece is called the Girl in the Garden. And it's sort of how we all remember those little days when we were girls in these magical gardens, how wonderful that was. What makes it, and this maybe is your technical question, why does that color change as I change my viewing angle? Because it's in sort of straight through the glass, so that as you look straight on, you only see a little bit of the color. But as you move to the side, you're looking, you know, through a much wider proportion of glass. I'm going to get a little color

here. Yeah, life in the city. Well, I wasn't an art major in college. I was an economics major in college. It never makes sense to me about art as such as yourself, because it takes you to make one of these things. How can you possibly make a living doing this?

Well, you know, you have to decide what's a living. You know, I like the life I have right now. So you just, you know, live a little more simply, maybe. You know, I don't have so many toys. But I have a lot of toys. It's much more fun for me to do this. Yeah, one of the women who's addressed my lecture that I asked that question for, she's got a bite that I really like on that to use. Yes, I'm now aspiring to minimum wage. Oh, I always tell people I'm independently poor. What is the market for your work down? Do you sell more for an

institutional kind of setting like you did at Toiletown, or is it individuals buying work or what is the work? I had concentrated on doing public art for several years. And in the last two years, I've been working on developing these pieces. So I haven't taken on any public art projects. Is there a line there you have to walk between making something that's commercially successful for yourself and to a artistic degree? Well, I think there probably is. But I haven't worried about it with these pieces yet. I really think that successful artists are that you make that really resonates with yourself. That's what resonates with other people. Otherwise, it's kind of like decoration. For me, I would rather not make the pieces than just make commercial

pieces. Because if I'm just making commercial pieces, I could go get a job someplace and actually make a living. I wouldn't have to sit in the studio and do that. All right. Okay. Oops. Oops.

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