My Cheerful Glass

Nancy “Cece” Sutton – My Cheerful Glass

I’m convinced that I was born an artist. I didn’t have any formal training because my father believed that educating girls beyond high school was a waste of time and money, as we were just going to be wives and mothers, never becoming persons in our own right. He was a man of his times, and I don’t necessarily fault him for that, but sometimes I feel that I could have gone much farther much faster had I been allowed to go to college and study art.

I can draw and paint, and that comes in handy for design, but two-dimensional images aren’t enough to satisfy my creative urges. I’m a maker, which means that I prefer to make something more tangible with my hands. I’m a fan of asymmetry and whimsy, and I like imperfections in artwork because they show the hand of the maker. Things that are perfectly square and orderly make me nervous, which is odd because I was a quilter for more than three decades, with several designs published in quilting magazines over the years

My current medium is glass – fused glass, mosaic and stained glass. I enjoy taking random pieces of glass and assembling them into small sun catchers, adding decorative solder and wire swirls to make each piece unique. I like to combine one or more of these techniques in any given piece. A friend who does mosaic convinced me, after much nagging, to take my first glass fusing class, and unleashed the monster which presently devours me.