Jim Vollmer
Just Imagine Glass Studio
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 creating pattern bars with the stringer, slicing, assembling, and fusing them, Vollmer uses the optic quality of the stringer to create a pointillist effect wherein non-primary colors are generated by the visual mixing that occurs in the viewer's eye when primary colors are placed in close proximity to each other. When clear stringer is superimposed over the colored stringer, its optic quality yields a depth of detail unexpected in glass.
