At the height of the pandemic, nobody was going anywhere, let alone traveling for in-person artist workshops. Luckily, a few hearty souls were conducting remote classes, usually on Zoom, and I managed to get into a class by California glass artist Janine Stillman in July, where we learned painting techniques using enamels on clear glass. It was fascinating, but I ended up with a bunch of 4-inch tiles and no clear use for them.

At the same time, I was switching from COE 96 art glass to COE 90 from Bullseye, but I still had a lot of scrap from the old glass. I cut up squares from scrap and the “feathered” or marbleized enamel tiles and carefully pieced them into the plate here. A Facebook group run by Warren Norgaard (my original glass-art teacher and current local supplier/enabler) selected the piece as one of the annual featured “Fused Glass Fanatics” of 2020 (the image cropped nicely into a corner and provided just the correct design balance for the merch, Warren confided).

At any rate, the piece is definitely one-of-a-kind, with hand-enameled bits and some colors of glass (transparent tangerine and bottle green) that are no longer even being made.