Bloom happened one cold-and-white February afternoon a couple years back. I had recently come across Rex Ray’s playful, bold abstracted botanicals and needed my own lush, exuberant flower garden to get me through that winter afternoon. Bloom is the first piece I made using sheet glass in my transition away from glass tile. The cutting was primitive and I wasn't clear on how it connected to the rest of my work but I was immediately addicted to my new-found freedom to cut larger forms. I made two, survived February and then moved onto other things. Bloom keeps coming back to me though: I can’t resist its exuberant color and geometric forms. And so a new and revised Bloom has become one of my Mosaic Element series. There are now three Blooms. Compositions are tightened and filled out. Color combinations vary between the three with a happy symmetry. The cutting has progressed. I've kept a tiny meander of white gold smalti—each line cut spontaneously, threading around the leaves and stems in a sort of garden path or bee’s flight or delirious ray of energy.
Pale yellows, ambers and olive greens in the ‘Fresh’ palette are based on my beloved “Golden Sunrise” helleborus. The 'Vivid' palette with intense orange, aqua, peacock and grass greens is my original mid-winter color-crave palette. And I still crave it.