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Alice Benvie Gebhart
Artist's Biography
Alice Benvie Gebhart grew up in a family that valued her artistic talents and abilities. Her father, a prolific New England Impressionist artist, introduced her to the art of painting at a young age. She graduated from Rhode Island College in her native Rhode Island, with an undergraduate degree in art and a graduate degree in education. Working as a high school art teacher, cooperating teacher for Rhode Island School of Design and adjunct faculty member at her alma mater, she has been a professional artist and art educator since 1980.
Winning regional awards for her paintings, Alice worked alternately in oils and stained glass for many years. In 2004, she attended a workshop in glass painting with Peter McGrain and was inspired to combine stained glass and glass painting. Her work developed and changed until she discovered the rich and vivid properties of fused glass. A most recent class with noted fused glass artist Roger Thomas in 2007 gave Alice Benvie Gebhart new ideas and inspiration. Alice’s experimentation with kiln-fired glass has grown into something that stands out from the norm.
Alice Benvie Gebhart’s artistic inspiration comes
primarily from the way light and color react with glass. Her subject matter is
the everyday scene one may drive by or pass without notice. Much like the
fauvist painter Henri Matisse, her subject is translated through the use of
dramatic color and light. Matisse used cut paper and paint to reinterpret
nature, Gebhart creates art with vibrant, painterly glass.
The Glass Fusing Process
Glass fusing (also
called kiln fired glass or warm glass) is the process of using a kiln to join
together pieces of glass. If you apply heat to glass, it will soften. If you
continue to apply heat, the glass will become more fluid and flow together. Two
or more pieces of glass will stick (or "fuse") to each other. When the right
kind of glass is heated and then cooled properly, the resulting fused glass
piece will be solid and unbroken.
The "heating" phase, which takes place between room temperature and around 1200
to 1700 degrees F (depending on the process you are performing), is where the
glass makes the transition from a solid to a more flowing form. As glass is
heated and moves through this phase, it goes through three separate states.
First, from room temperature up to about 1000 degrees F (540 degrees C), glass
remains rigid and brittle. It is expanding slowly, but will still crack or break
if the temperature increases too rapidly. Full fusing, the complete merging of
two or more pieces of glass into one, takes place at around 1500 degrees F.
Inspiration and Technique
As an artist I
specialize in fusing glass together to create an image of color and light. As
with any artistic process one must start with an idea. My ideas and
inspirations come from the everyday scene and the colors of Fauvist artists
Derain and Matisse. I mentally record and take photographs of the scenery
around me. I later sketch the scene, emphasizing color and light in my
compositions.
sketches
Working off the sketches I’ve created, I then cut and
layer colored glass, specifically made for glass fusing, in a kind of collage.
This is fired in a glass kiln, often 3-5 times to obtain the desired effect.
I often include specialty glasses such as dichroic glass and iridescent glass
to give my work a luminescent quality. Twenty-three karat gold lusters, gold
and silver leaf, mica, copper and other distinctive ingredients are often added
and inserted in the glass to create special effects within each piece.
The completed pieces are transformed into either wall art
or free-standing sculptures.
glass