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Jim's Home

Stained Glass

Jim Vormelker's
Stained Glass Gallery

The primary challenge of stained glass for me is designing for the setting. My preference is for one-off design for residential enhancement.

When stained glass is inserted into a home, the room becomes a little cozier and more intimate. The window becomes a design element of the room. It also becomes something to live with, to provide decades of enjoyment. It is important that — whatever the commission — the work integerate so that it becomes comfortable, another member of the family.

Since each person has unique tastes and desires, I can indulge my itch to make radically different design styles. One of the sure tags for a Jim Vormelker design is that it probably looks very little like any other Jim Vormelker design.

On work that is pictorial in nature, I must use the glass so that a near photographic quality is achieved. I want the eye to dance between seeing a window and seeing a photograph. The mind must accept both ideas at once!

I am equally comfortable using glass as the medium for craft projects. The clock series is such an application. Again, the object is to create something that can be lived with for a very long time.

For a larger view of the thumbnail images shown here, please click the image.

	"Transom", approx 24"x30" Lives over the door to a strip center buisness. The design was born from the need to have my address easily found by people driving by, not paying attention to where they were or I was. There were a lot of those people. The sign helped.

	"Dragon", 23.5" diameter This is from a family pattern that is now in is third generation of use... having also become comfortable as a ceramic table top and needle point pillow, among other media. This was my first piece large enough to stand back from. In its original form, it had glue chip as the background glass, but I was never really satisfied with it that way. Browsing the bins in the stained glass warehouse I came across the piece which is now the background.The pattern of the swirls softens the stark form of the dragon, providing a balance to the piece it could not otherwise have achieved.

	"Kitchen Bird of Paradise", 33.5"x 34" Just before the owners took posession of the house, the Italian Cypress on the other side of the driveway evaporated, leaving a wonderful kitchen window view of a neighbor's bathroom window. The problem was to decorate and improve the view without making the sink area dingy.The Bird of Paradise makes a great subject for stained glass. This window is refelcted in the front of one of the kitchen cupboards, providing a nice visual flow to the room.

	"Open" and "Shut", 8" x 16" each in teak frame These are actually the second time I did this, since on my very first piece I didn't use stock pattern, and did not understand that I only needed enough lines to cut the glass... it didn't need to be an exercise in maximum square inches of soldering.

	"Non-Objective 01", 10"x24" This is a case of the medium dictating the design. It's another case of deciding to do something different.As the scraps started to accumulate — and they DO accumulate in a stained glass studio — I decided on an etude. The requirements were that the colors flow across the piece from cool to warm, and any piece that got used had to fit physically against its neighbors with no additonal shaping. The bevel was dictated by my stiff-necked adherance to these criteria. I've always been pleased with how the exercise turned out.

	"Peacock", 26"x34" This lives in a hall and needs to let in a good deal of light. It was necessary that it reflect the feeling of India for the client, who had spent several years there. Here the intent was to present a graphic of the bird rather than a photograph; the design of the tail feathers is implied with the blue and green of the catspaw glass.

	"Shadow Box Mirror", 16"x24"x4" Done as a teenage girl's dresser-mirror, the tree trunks are polished agate slabs.

	"The Dancer", 41"x71 3/8" A very satisfying example of converting a photograph to a photographic glass panel.It took more than 6 months to assemble the glass needed to translate the textures, colors, and densities of the original picture. In many instances a 6x8 plate of glass yielded only a square foot or so of the appropriate figure, resulting in a prodigious scrap pile. Ultimately I selected 15 types of glass from 5 American and 2 European art glass suppliers. Construction, which uses came, copper foil, multilayering and enameling, consumed just under 3 months.

	Untitled, Permenant Collection, Califoria State University at Fullerton, 22.5"x93" The window was required to blend with the surroundings, enhance the area and not overpower the people who must work right next to the installation 8 hours every day. The window alone (left) and installed (above).

	Mosaic of Mexican tiles, 2 panels, 20" x 48" Designed for a home rich in Central American artifacts, the two panels flank a large fireplace. Light transmission was secondary to privacy and style.Detailed image (left) and the work in place (above).

Jim Vormelker's Stained Glass Gallery

Jim Vormelker's
Stained Glass Gallery