Deb Brown: Painting With Light

BY DAWN RITCHIE

The fall Images Studio Tour was fast approaching and glass and metal artist, Deb Brown, frenziedly prepared her newest pieces for the show. Sprinkling crushed glass powder and flakes onto her canvas, she built layer upon layer, before committing her work to a kiln. From a clear glass blank, what slowly emerged was a light-dappled pathway winding through a verdant birch forest.

Mounted on a wrought iron stand, the sphere transforms into a delicate sculpture of light and colour, drawing you along a path through the forest to a glowing beam ahead. “There’s a light of the soul within each of us,” says Brown. “My artwork are stories designed to reflect back to people their own light, their own strength. To give people joy and hope in this crazy world.”

Growing bored after years of working on a flat plane, Brown wanted to branch out into 3D. She learned how to weld and for the last twelve years has focussed entirely on fused glass created in a kiln. “It blew the boundaries of stained glass wide open,” she says. “I don’t have to solder. There’s no lead involved. No black lines between the pieces. It melts in the kiln. It’s fascinating the things you can do with glass. Really tricky, but endlessly fascinating.”

Brown has been a fulltime glass artist for thirty years now and has participated in the Images Tour since 1993. So successful is her tour stop, that she earns half of her yearly salary at the show. The rest comes from studio sales and commissions which begin with an intriguing “Imagination Session” with clients.

Brown’s work has appeared in forty-five galleries across Canada, including the McMichael, and is in private collections from Europe and Australia to the United States. Her Starlight jewelry features dichroic glass, which reflects the prismatic colors of the light spectrum. Her Water Is Life collection are earring pendants in the shape of water drops, created specifically for a water protecting project Brown is deeply passionate about. Twenty-five percent of those sales are donated to the Water Protectors.

Often mistaken for an indigenous artist, due to her subject matter, Brown clarifies that she is in fact not of that heritage at all. Nor does she profess to make indigenous art. Her work is “earth-oriented,” she explains. In her studio, Spiral Dreamworks, you will find a canoe soaring across a musical treble clef staff. A heron taking flight over amber waters and continents growing as leaves from a tree’s branches.

Her latest collection is her Walking Bear series. Bear-shaped sun catchers that are filled with scenic landscapes from Muskoka and Simcoe. This November, she is also beginning work on a new series, which she is naming, The Faces of Nature, based on the human faces that often appear in rocks, trees and landscapes.

“It’s a way to touch on the spirit and the power of nature,” she says. “A source of beauty inside all of us.”