Bottom view of 'Orchid Symphony', a 24" diameter reverse painted glass chandelier that includes irons, electrical, chain and canopy. Jenny Floravita's Hand Painted Chandeliers can be purchased through Jenny Floravita's website http://www.floravitalights.comInspiration is personal to every artist. Some days I will simply stand at my easel and begin to paint by layering and splashing colors onto my glass canvas. The patterns and values of the colors then inspire the flowers that emerge in my glass hand painted chandeliers.
Recently I had a studio show where I invited a dear sculptor friend who shows in galleries and her process of sculpting is sometimes not so different from my process of painting on glass. She explained to clients that her woods dictate the forms of the sculpture and sometimes add surprises, like an unplanned form the emerges that she hadn't envisioned...it was simply there all along within the wood. When I paint completely freely with my chandeliers, this also happens.
But sometimes, my inspiration comes directly from a very specific exotic flower or a combination of colors. When I am in the creation process for my reverse painted chandeliers, sometimes I end up mixing sections of colors that may be the inspiring starting point for my very next chandelier.
Mixing colors is endlessly fascinating to me and it is my ability to mix colors well that creates my unique voice in this art form. My color mixing is what creates my soft romantic hues and dramatic moods. When I was in my early teens, I knew that I would be a professional artist. I worked then as a watercolorist. There was nothing so fascinating to me as the fist sections of wet fluid color that spilled from my brush onto my Arches watercolor paper. Those first splashes of color set the inspiration to move me through the difficult sections of my paintings towards completion. And I always looked forward to the next painting for the same reason. This makes me a colorist by nature.These are two very different creation processes that both work well for me as a contemporary glass artist. The starting points are very different yet both creative processes share the same elements at some point.
Inspiration and the creative process, as both are needed in order to create an art piece that is successful, is something that is very abstract to most and...well, God given in the same way that everyone is given their special talents. There is not a day that I paint on glass that I am not grateful that I was born with the talent for this marvelous art form. And I feel like I could write forever about what it is exactly that fuels an artist forward in their form. Creativity is a very interesting process in itself.
Hope that my explanation helps to shed some light on how I choose to paint what it is that I paint. Thank you for looking at a picture of one of my newest hand painted chandeliers!
To see more reverse painted glass chandeliers and art by Jenny Floravita, please visit my websites: www.floravitalights.com and www.floravita.com
