Stained Glass Artist at Art on the Bayou Tarpon
Glass artist returns to this weekend's Bayou City Art Festival
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Jennifer Romero's latest work rests on an old drafting board in her living room.
The stained glass image she calls "Moon Child" isn't finished yet - bits of colored glass lie pieced together similar a jigsaw puzzle, the spaces between filled with delicate copper foil. Merely fifty-fifty upside downwardly and in pieces, it's hitting. A young daughter perches among the branches of a dark tree, gazing up at a giant, milky moon. Her back is turned, and her total skirt swirls around her, a alloy of emerald and seafoam, pale mint and turquoise blue.
"She'south climbed up in the tree to get as close as she possibly tin to the moon," Romero explains, running a hand over smoothen bits of glass. "She'south captured, she's taken, she'southward kind of lured, merely feels a condolement in the closeness to the moon."
Crazy beautiful: See some of the fine art going on display this weekend
"Moon Child" is based on a photo of her 16-year-onetime girl, Corey. And with days remaining, Romero is racing to end the slice for the Bayou Metropolis Art Festival, which opens Fri in Memorial Park.
The spring fest will characteristic Romero and nearly 300 other artists who travel from all over the country (and a few international spots) to show and sell their paintings, sculpture, photography, jewelry, woodwork, glasswork and more.
It's the tertiary Bayou City appearance for Romero, 41, who lives in Lake Jackson. She won "Best Booth" terminal leap for transforming her allotted infinite into a different world full of bright rugs and rich colors, topped by a canopy of lush fabrics.
Bayou City Art Festival Memorial Park
When: 10 a.chiliad.-vi p.m. Friday-Lord's day
Parking: No public parking volition be bachelor in Memorial Park. Complimentary buses volition run from Northwest Mall and the Downtown Theater District starting at 9:30 a.m. all 3 days.
Access: $15; $3 kids ages iii-12; gratis for ages 3 and younger
Details: bayoucityartfestival.com
Romero is one of just a few Houston-area artists selected for this year's festival. Growing up in Freeport, she was an artistic kid and wanted to be a lensman, but being an artist didn't seem like a practical career choice. So she studied engineering drafting and design at Brazosport College, then went to work drawing piping and instrumentation diagrams for a chemical found.
In 1995, Romero signed up for a grade taught past a local drinking glass creative person.
"I always loved stained glass and was always fatigued to it," she explains, adding that she wanted to make some to brandish in her ain home. Glasswork became a hobby.
A few years later, a friend asked Romero to create a custom slice of glasswork for her dwelling.
"It was just kind of a one-time thing," Romero says. "I was doing something for a friend."
But that turned into some other project, then some other. In 2001, she quit her chore to devote her full attention to stained glass.
Romero and her sometime sister-in-law, Sarah Romero - a painter and graphic designer - went into business organization together: Gypsy Railroad vehicle Art is a combination of Jennifer Romero's glasswork and Sarah Romero'south paintings.
The two friends don't take a storefront, but they sell their creations in local shops and online (www.gypsywagonart.com). They tin't bear witness their work as a team at fine art festivals, but every fall Gypsy Wagon sets up a booth for viii weeks at the Texas Renaissance Festival.
Jennifer Romero does custom stained glass work to society, but her heart is in her own creations - rich Fine art Nouveau-style compositions full of mermaids and twisting vines, peacocks and collywobbles, immature women with flowing pilus. Those range from $1,500 to $5,000, depending on how complicated the design is.
A single piece can easily take 200 hours to complete, Romero says. She starts each one with a sketch - pencil on paper.
"Sometimes I'yard working from photographs," she says. "Sometimes I'g working from images in my ain mind."
She divides the sketch into hundreds of pieces, and so assigns a number to each piece. Later that, she carefully selects which slice of Uroboros drinking glass will fill each space, looking for streaks and striations that will add together texture and interest. And so it's a matter of scoring the glass, breaking it and grinding the edges until they're smooth. She assembles the pieces, fills the spaces with copper foil and solders it all together, turning hundreds of $.25 into a delicate whole.
Well-nigh a dozen lamps make full the studio behind Romero's business firm, but she prefers to work - and brandish her stained glass - in the natural low-cal of a window.
"One of my favorite things near drinking glass - always has been - is how it changes with the light," she said. "A unmarried piece in a window in your habitation looks different from the morning, throughout the 24-hour interval, into the evening. It changes. It's almost alive."
Source: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/article/Glass-artist-returns-to-this-weekend-s-Bayou-City-4371195.php
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