While on a camping trip in the Catskills, for the first time in my life I noticed and was completely mesmerized by a yellow phenomenon I had no idea existed.  An endless blanket of flowers rolled up and down through out the green hills.  Everywhere I looked, there were yellow flowers – all different kinds. Bands of white were weaved through out with sparse accents of purple. It was breathtaking.  The image of the rugged, green mountains rolling in this magnificent field of wild flowers made a very strong impression on me.  Ever since that trip I’ve never looked at a field of flowers in the same.

Those yellow fields of flowers really stuck in my mind.  Once I was back in my studio in Brooklyn, I knew I had to try to convey what I experienced in glass.  At this point, I’ve only been working with glass for about two years.  Up to this point, I’ve been working on series inspired by patterns in nature.  The pieces started out pretty abstractly and slowly evolved into what I called Agate Landscapes.  I saw the bands of colors in rocks and imagined them to be rolling hills as well as more angular rock formations.  Those slowly started morphing into hill like shapes with an impression of  a sky.  The Catskills piece is what I feel was the first piece in a new series, one heading toward a more clearly recognizable landscape.

When I thought of the field of flowers, I knew that I didn’t want to make thousands of ‘actual’ flowers.  Instead I came up with the concept of the hand cut circles to represent the various flowers that would be differentiated by color rather than shape.  This is a theme that has been securing in my work since.

The Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York are a Northeastern Paradise.  I’ve really enjoyed my trips to this area and upon returning to my studio in Brooklyn, I decided to revisit the mountains through my artwork. When I hiked up Blue Lake Mountain, I got to the top just as the sub began to go down.  The view was perfect as the mountains were really in focus and the colors were deep in hue and were slowly changing as the sun was racing toward the horizon. I breathed it in the view and then had to run down the mountain racing with the dimming light, arriving back at the trail head after dusk.

All three of the above mosaics were studies inspired by the gradual setting sun over the mountains.  The distant silhouettes of the neighboring mountains begin to blend in with the horizon.  As the sun sets, the green mountains begin to loose their color and morph into a whole new mountain range.  Quickly the mountains and the sky become almost one with each other until it becomes too dark to distinguish the defining line which creates the silhouette of the mountains.