Irises, inspired by Van Gogh. 2018. 29 x 35 cm

The idea to create Irises came to my head ten years ago. But up until now, it was never technically possible. I would never bring myself to do this if I did not feel I had the strength to accomplish it. This is a difficult work. It has a living character and I need to convey this character. I need the Irises to look beautiful in glass. 

For me this work is a test of my capabilities when working with glass. Experiment. Can I convey a painting through glass? I have already been successful in representing icons, a tapestry and manuscripts with glass, can I accomplish the same with a painting? The glass gives off its own charm with this work, it looks beautiful when you look at it and when you touch it. With my glass art, I have been progressively creating more and more difficult pieces (take a look at the post called 15 Years of Creativity in Glass here). However, this project in particular was still quite an ambitious undertaking from my point of view. 

 Irises for me meant a new frontier. A definite checkpoint in my life’s path. My glass returned me to life after four years of heavy depression. I am saying this without any pathos. I also think of Irises as a work in which I pursue a bipolar study. I chose Van Gogh because he too suffered from bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in December 2014 and since then I have been suffering from heavy depression. However, Irises captured my heart and soul so fully that I kept thinking about them every day. I was once again inspired. And so I came back to life. 

 Of course I thought about Van Gogh and of myself. I thought about how he lived at in an asylum and within a year managed to paint over 130 works of art and how Irises was his very first work during his time there. An artist needs to have the possibility to create, everything else becomes secondary. I have the opportunity to fuse my glass and to work on my own projects. I am very grateful for this opportunity. I thought about how it took Van Gogh only 2-3 days to paint Irises and how satisfied he was with them, very satisfied. My process of making Irises stretched out over half a year, counting two months of summer break where I did not work on glass at all. It took me a total of seventy hours to finish Irises. I am satisfied with my Irises, very satisfied. Now it is going to be more fun, I plan to dedicate more time to my glass. I am interested once more. 

I have already written that you can take my works and feel them with your hands. For myself as a kinesthetic, this is critical. My works are very tangible. They possess a weight, a thickness, a surface texture of lines, brush strokes, dots and flowers. It is very pleasant to touch them. I wanted the opportunity to touch Van Gogh’s Irises. Van Gogh’s Irises served as a model for my Irises. 

 What can I say? First I created all the leaves of the Irises. I followed Van Gogh’s brush strokes when I placed my glass powder. Unfortunately, I was limited in terms of my colour choice and unlike with paint, you cannot really mix the glass powders together to create a new colour. This meant that the leaves were created with five different shades. Next, I gathered myself up and set to work on the irises. They also possessed around 5-6 different shades of glass powders. There was one colour which I did not use and it was dark cobalt blue. I decided that if I were to use it, the Irises would turn out to be artificially blue. The idea of darker irises was ok with me. 

 After completing the leaves and some irises in the piece, the work was fused. I have never done this before where I fuse in the middle of the process, but I very much wanted to see how it would look. Once I saw my lively Irises, I was filled with joy. My Irises were significantly darker than the original. The colours by the names of aventurine blue and midnight blue practically became indistinguishable but I did not have the appropriate blue that I needed. By the way, the incomplete version of Irises that you see below on its own is not such a bad painting and idea. 

 How did I choose my colours? I had a palette of glass powder that I worked with. I knew off the bat that I would not be able to achieve Van Gogh’s colours, I work with an entirely different technique, with an entirely different material and with a strict colour scale. But I decided for myself a certain colour code and I held to it. 

 There was already some movement and rhythm within my work, thus I continued. On this photo you can see my fused irises, the fused ones are a darker shade and on the right while the unfused ones are of a lighter shade on the left. This is how they change colour when fused. At the same time, you can see the amount of paintbrushes, needles and painting knives that I work with. 

 I worked on the top part of my Irises. I made a bright green and light green field with some white, yellow and orange. 

I was eager to see how they would look again after fusing. And so, the Irises were fused a second time. What did I see? I saw the the lettuce green colour that I put in the top right corner turned out darker than I expected. So stubborn is my glass that it decided to incorporate its own outlook into my work. I came to like this outlook. I suspect that it was a reaction of the glass on a low temperature profile. But a higher temperature profile I did not want because I would lose the very beautiful relief in the work and the feeling of the brush stroke and all that would remain is just a flat surface. 

After the second fusing, I just filled in the blank areas. Where Van Gogh was just filling in the space, I also coloured automatically. Where Van Gogh had details, I would also add details. 

In the top part of Irises, I had some space left. Initially I wrote a full text. I love writing texts on my works. I wrote in English with the help of glass powder “Is it possible to create a painting in glass? This study uses Irises by Van Gogh as a model. This is made using fused glass powder. Julia Protkova. 2018”. 

Afterwards, I erased all the writings with the help of a wet rag and simply wrote “Irises. Inspired by Van Gogh. Glass work by Julia Protkova. 2018.” 

Finally, the Irises were fused for the third time. Thus, my Irises were ready at last. A complex piece. Probably the best work I have done thus far with fusing.

Glass powder technique described here.