A few words about my work - why it's done - and how
My name is Peter - The Beader. I am a New Zealander - well, actually a "cardboard kiwi", because my citizenship papers are printed on cardboard. I have always been fascinated by glass - stained glass. In the early years, around the 1980's, I started working with leadlighting. But, alas: too big, too heavy, too clumsy, didn't like it - so after a while I gave it up. I still have a collection of antique beautiful leadlight windows, some from old churches and hundreds of years old.
After leadlighting I discovered the "Tiffany-Technique" (aka "copper foiling") - which is pure Art Nouveau (Jugendstil). It is more subtle, delicate, elegant, it has transparenter designs - and now I was able to really "paint" = to give colour, with and to glass. I did that work for many years, thus becoming well aquainted with Mr L C Tiffany's work and his art, his ideas, designs and his materials - in particular glass, of course. After finally finishing one of the most complicated pieces, Tiffany's "Flowering Lotus" lamp with approx. 1,400 tiny pieces of glass, there wasn't anything exciting left I could do, except repetitions - and replicating Tiffany's work basically is already repetition in the first place.Well. "For the money"? Maybe just another "Bird of Paradise" lamp, my most successful design? No. Thank you...
Then came many trips to Europe, to France, Spain and Italy, to Thuringia and to Bohemia, to the Black Forest and to several glass factories and glass artists there. And of course we (= me and The Memsahib - "She Who Has To Be Obeyed!") went to Venice again - La Serenissima, a city which has fascinated me for all of my life, where I have been innumerous times. I used to own a house on the hills above Lago di Garda, not far away from the Veneto, where I lived and worked for a while. Murano is a small island in the lagoon near Venice. Glass and glass art is made here since ancient times, hundreds of years ago glassmakers were banished to Murano because of the fire hazard within the city of Venice, decreed so by the venetian leader, the Doge. There, totally fascinated, I watched an Italian artist and his daughter (and his son in law - hailing from Berlin, of all places...) doing real, old-fashioned flamework. Near the Bohemian border I watched another artist making contemporary glass jewellery, working with a "Bohemian fire" (13 burners bundle up to one flame, fuelled by propane, boosted by compressed air) - and I was completely hooked. Flying back home to Raglan / NZ, getting the equipment, buying all the books which were about flameworking and available on the market, reading those all in one go, setting up my workshop and - hey presto - here I was: doing flamework.
I mainly use Italian Moretti (Effetre) COE104 glass from Murano (which I get delivered to my New Zealand studio in a very puzzling and labyrinthine way): soda glass, because glass artists all over the world have used that for ages and they still do. For decorations I work with Moretti Dichroic glass, Lauscha Filigrano, quite a lot of Double Helix silver glasses, Kugler or Bullseye Aventurine, shards and frits of all makes and sorts as well as handpulled stringers and twisties and a lot of .999 silver foil, leaf and wire. My torch is a simple Nortel Minor or Carlisle CC, running on 60% propane / 40% butane LPG and oxygen supplied by two oxygen concentrators. My bead release is homemade from kaoline and alumina hydrate - with some other "secret" ingredients. I anneal in a kiln, in a warming bed or in Vermiculite - depending on the complexity of the bead.
Most of the glass objects or sets I create are used to make jewellery: pendants, necklaces, colliers, bracelets or earrings and for that I have set up my own silversmithing workshop.
All of my pieces are absolutely unique - there never will be and never can be two the same.
