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Lisa Chernoff, Nancy and Jon Couch forge 'Glass Inspirations' at Wild Hearts Gallery
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Find the end of the rainbow in Wild Hearts Gallery’s newest exhibit, “Glass Inspirations: Fused and Stained Glass,” by artists Lisa Chernoff and Nancy and Jon Couch.
The Couches create stained glass windows, jewelry and boxes, but their primary focus is water prisms — geometrically shaped vessels filled with water, that create rainbows with light.
Nancy Couch said they have several in their home and it is a spectacular display of rainbows.
“(The rainbows) move all around the house, the ceiling, the floors, the walls,” Couch said. “They’ll land on things that are in the way, like a couch, and so as the rainbows come in, they will shine on whatever stops them.”
Couch said she also enjoys it when the prisms’ colors cross one another, changing them even more. At Wild Hearts, she demonstrates how the prisms are interactive.
“At the gallery, they don’t really get the full sun,” Couch said, noting the gallery’s portal keeps it darker inside than most homes.
“So what I do is I usually take a prism out to the patio and I can shine the rainbows into the gallery.”
The sun is not the only thing that can create rainbows through the prisms, Couch said, so can the moon.
“We call them moonbows because they’re like rainbows, but they come from the full moon, and they’re very pastely colors,” Couch said, “but they’re made from the water prisms and the moon hitting them.”
Chernoff focuses on fused glass projects and said firing glass in a kiln can yield surprising outcomes. She has found that fusing glass has changed her attitude toward the outcome of her work and they way she approaches it.
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“I try not to see mistakes as, ‘Oh, this is awful,’” Chernoff said, “but I’ll see I like a certain element of what happened.
“Like, that was a strange thing, and I had this certain thing really turn out nice, and maybe I can grab on to that and grow it.”
She has several pieces at Wild Hearts, including diptychs, a triptych and a table. Her work usually leans more towards the abstract, she said, but she has one piece in the show that depicts a person and a cat, a mixture of abstract and realistic elements.
“It just has to do with uncertainty that is happening,” Chernoff said, “and so that made me want to do something that’s a little more realistic.”
Chernoff said she finds that her work and the Couches’ blends together to make a cohesive display of glass and color.
“I do find that the colors that we choose are often compatible, and so it’s a cohesive show,” Chernoff said. “It doesn’t look like that one is distinctly flat stained glass, and mine is fused, but colors and the element of it being glass makes it cohesive.”
