About the Artist :: Lindley Briggs

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Lindley Briggs received her B.A from Connecticut College, New London Connecticut in 1967. She studied sculpture at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture from 1967 through 1969. Over the past five years she has both taken and taught courses at Sanctuary Arts in South Elliot Maine. There she has returned to working on clay portrait sculptures with live models as reference in order to gather some reality data to add to the mythical creatures she creates in her studio.

Over the past 35 years, she has had numerous shows featuring her sculptures, drawings, collages and prints. Her work has been featured in national publications —- YANKEE MAGAZINE, FINE WOODWORKING, THE NEW YORK TIMES, ART BUSINESS NEWS and THE BOSTON GLOBE. Her current collection of bronze sculptures in represented in six galleries.

Recently she has written about her current collection of bronzes: “The boundaries between fantasy, reality and surreality are not necessarily firm. I love to explore and manipulate these boundaries. For years I have created fantastic winged, feathered and finned creatures in both two and three dimensions. My creatures are seldom purely realistic. They are whimsical, anthropomorphic and capricious. They fly, swim or otherwise waft through their environments. They are inspired by my lifelong fascination with the beauty of natural forms-shells, stones, branches, wings and the fanciful imagery from Classical Greek and Roman mythology-winged, dancing and otherwise dynamic deities.”

About the Artist :: Ken Peterson

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“I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to work with hot glass. It’s been my path for the exploration of my identity as an artist, an American artist who is half Japanese and half Caucasian. Growing up surfing in Hawaii, I spent a lot of time in the ocean. I loved the water, and how it moved. I found that if I flowed with the water, surfing went smoothly, but if I became stiff and lost my fluidity, I would lose control. Hot glass is like the ocean. It takes a fluid touch. Whenever I shape a piece of glass, I feel like I have a little piece of hot molten ocean in my hands. Being able to create forms, vibrant colors, and optical illusions from a liquid has fascinated me from the moment I was first exposed to the glass blowing process. Since then I’ve been in love, and completely hooked.

I had the unique opportunity to go to one of the only high schools in the nation with a hot glass studio. It was at Punahou School on the island of Oahu that Hugh Jenkins first put a blowpipe in my hands. I spent a year there in an excellent program learning the basics and trying to figure out how to work with this strange and tricky material. I wasn’t ready to give up blowing glass after graduating from high school in 1995. So when I found I could study both art and engineering at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, I couldn’t resist and came to California. Here I met the interesting glass-sculpting professor, George Jerich. George made me look at glass from a different direction. I’ve also been blessed since 1998 with the opportunity to apprentice under Carle Radke at Phoenix studios in Harmony, California. Carl, who is a master of Tiffany style Art Nouveau glass, taught me techniques that have been essential to the development of my color application and approach to blowing. All of my present work is made at Phoenix Studios. During the summer of 2001 I studied off hand solid sculpting from the Italian Maestro Dino Rosin, at Pilchuck, near Seattle, Washington. This had opened the door to a whole new world of possibilities. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always been able to design my own pieces. The process of concocting an image in my mind and making that image reality through a piece of molten glass keeps me continually excited about my work. From the first time I touched hot glass to now, glass has become my main passion in life. I am lucky to have been at the right places at the right times. If all goes well, my exploration will continue.

About the Artist :: John Lufty-Balzer (“Johnny B”)

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A sculpture as well a teacher, Johnny B’s Tumbled Stone Sculptures actually began as a garden experiment inspired by a friend. The bases are typically Deer Isle granite, which is used in buildings around the country. They have been sawn, ground, chiseled and flame-treated to their present shapes. The tumbled stones have been carried as much as half a mile from beaches, road sides and quarries in Maine and New Brunswick (the colored stones being from Canada). All are shaped by the action of the water. Some are shaped by glacial rivers created by receding glaciers 10,000 years ago. They are all uniquely beautiful granites, colored mostly by various feldspars.

Once the major tumbled stone is chosen, the rest of the sculpture builds itself. It determines the shape and size of the base and then all the other stones. Each sculpture is built free standing without shims. Every stone is marked, drilled, pinned and the sculpture reassembled. Each pin is glued with high grade silicon caulk on top of each stone to prevent water damage during the winter.