Fabulous Glass class with Miriam Di Fiore

Recently I took a great glass class with the world renown artist Miriam Di Fiore. She creates fabulous Glass landscapes that are just incredible. I have always been drawn to landscapes and especially Miriam’s glass landscapes. They are not just typical landscapes. Here are a few of Miriam’s landscapes she showed us. Aren’t they amazing. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket but aren’t Miriam’s glass instruments stunning!

Miriam is a fabulous teacher, she’s extremely passionate and meticulous about her art. She wants her students to have great pieces so she’s pretty specific about her technique. But I don’t mind a direct instructor. 
The other thing I loved about Miriam is not only is she passionate, she’s technical. She gave us so many technical lessons about glass. Things I never knew, it was a truly fantastic class.  
Oh yeah and did I mention she also went over some of the websites from some of the students and gave them advise (which we could all use). Then she went over her glass pieces and gave us some specifics about displaying our art.  Speaking of here are 2 more of her pieces, the display really adds vs distracts from the piece.

Miriam also is one of the first teachers that I’ve worked with that encouraged us not to just use her technique but to teach it. Normally that’s a big no no. All she asked was that we give her credit. My view is why wouldn’t you acknowledge the instructor, I always say “I learned this technique from Bob Leatherbarrow or Tanya Viet or David Alcala or Patty Gray etc.” It’s important to me to give credit where credit is due. 
The other thing she said that was pretty fascinating that I never really thought about is, when we post our pictures of what we made to make sure we say it was made in class with her help and guidance. Her reasoning is when we make something in class it’s not really just ours. There were 10 people in Miriam’s class and we were all looking at each other’s work and asking each other for input and of course Miriam helped with each piece either pulling stringers or adding this or taking off that or recommending color combinations. Her point is it’s not just ours and to say that it is would be misleading. Considering I never sell my pieces from class this is a pretty easy request, plus the only time I show my class pieces are in my blog and it’s all about my class.  These are her versions of what was done in class but in both cases they are not done, she said she has at least 2 or 3 more firings before she is happy with hers.

The class was 5 days and we worked with the torch a lot (she showed us the difference between using a micro butane torch and the mapp gas torch.  Until my class with Tonya I never used a torch for fused glass (have taken  a couple flameworking classes but totally different torch). We were using the torch constantly. I really liked it. 

In my next blog I’ll show you my pieces I made in class.  I just really loved this class and I wanted to show what an amazing artist she is.

If you would like to see more of my fused glass work please refer to my website Elegant Fused Glass by Karen. If you get a chance, check out all my sites, Fused Glass by Karen, My Etsy store, my Art fire Store, my Pinterest, and Elegant Fused Glass by Karen youtube. If you would like to stay abreast of what I’m up-to and learn a little more about jewelry, check out our newsletter. It is published the last day of each month.

Keeping my Kiln warm,

Karen

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