Jim Vollmer

Just Imagine Glass Studio

"Over more than 25 years of fusing glass, I have found that glass art runs the range of style and design from "less is more" to "God is in the details." Personally, I enjoy the details."

Jim Vollmer creates intricate glass artworks that reveal their true beauty slowly over time. It is his work's depth and detail that initially make each piece "love at first sight" and then a welcome companion for life. Design, texture, and visual effects are the drivers that motivate his fusing.

Vollmer achieves his detail through many means, chief among them temperature and time. Temperatures at the low end of the fusing range allow him to utilize texture and relief in all his work. For example, Vollmer found that encasing a layer of colored stringer within several layers of clear stringer produced an optical illusion that resembles woven fabric. This became "Shimmy," his first "glass fabric." Further experimentation with different techniques resulted in a second series of glass fabric he calls "translucent wool."

And Vollmer's work continues to evolve. His latest series, "Tapestry," takes the use of stringer in a more complex direction. By slicing, assembling, and fusing stringer to create pattern bars, Vollmer uses the optic quality of the stringer to create a pointillist effect: secondary colors appear to the viewer's eye through the visual mixing of primary colors placed in close proximity to one another. When clear stringer is superimposed over the colored stringer, its optic qualities yields a depth of detail unexpected in glass.

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