Glass artist's passion is to transform living spaces

Christopher Smith creates unique art pieces

It was a way of staving off boredom as a boy during long days at church - Christopher Smith would become mesmerized by the light filtering through the church's stained glass windows and the way it scattered kaleidoscopic colours across the floor.

"As a Catholic you were stuck in there every Sunday, and if you were going to school you were usually stuck in there at least once a day," said Smith. "It was one of those things where as you were doing something really boring as a kid you're going to get distracted, and I was always sucked right into the windows."

That early artistic influence stuck with Smith, and as a young man he apprenticed with Thomas Shields in Nelson to become a stained glass artist.

Today, Smith practises a variety of innovative techniques such as fused and kiln-casted glass to create unique art pieces that are then displayed in galleries and shows. His most recent work in kiln-casted glass was featured on Saturday at the third annual Island glass art show and sale at the Vancouver Island Conference Centre, and he has an upcoming show at the Old School House gallery in Qualicum in May.

Smith first started out in a Nanaimo studio across from the old train station in 1977. Much of his work was primarily architectural that included building and restoring church windows.

He enjoyed the ability to transform people's living spaces.

"You'd be sitting in a place with a stained glass window and light will hit it and it will throw colours on the wall and the whole area will be affected by it, so it creates an atmosphere," said Smith, who also made the windows in the Ecumenical Centre on Spartan Road, and the Anglican church in Lantzville, among others.

This work continued until 2009, when the economy forced Smith to look at other options. Ultimately, he returned to independent artistic projects.

Along the way he had fallen in love with a potter, Jane Murray-Smith, and together they moved to Lantzville and opened a studio, where he currently operates his Glaskrafter art studio.

Between them they operate eight kilns.

Their property is a hive of activity, with glazed rabbits and vases cooling in sawdust and rainbow-hued rows of shattered glass in jars awaiting transformation into butterflies and shimmering salmon.

The idea of using kilns to fuse coloured glass came to Smith in the late 1970s.

"Before I even set up the studio in Nanaimo I got a job building lamps for a pizza restaurant in Victoria, and they were primarily fused opalescent glass on slumped panels that I then assembled with lead," said Smith. "At that point, there wasn't much literature out there about (fused glass). I was pretty much stumbling around in the dark."

When he set up his studio in Nanaimo, the first thing Smith did was to build an annealing kiln. This was a variety of kiln that glass blowers used to put their ware in after it comes off the pipe so it cools slowly, said Smith, who had inadvertently exploded some glass during a course he was teaching at the Alberta College of Art and Design.

This technique soon lead to his current fascination with kiln-casted glass, which forms the bulk of his current glass art.

In his studio, he shows a thick hunk of glass in which swims a multitude of abstract forms and colours, intermingled with bubbles and texture.

"It's seriously thick, so as you look at it, there's all sorts of things happening inside of the glass, and that's probably the attraction for me more than anything else, is all the different things you can get happening inside of the piece of glass," said Smith.

He flips open the kiln to give a peek at his current project that utilizes both fused and kiln-casted glass.

He creates butterflies with what he calls a pattern-bar technique, and then embeds those butterflies into what looks like a large transparent decorative and textured dinner plate.

The sheer variety of styles encompassed in his studio and the gallery-room upstairs, are dizzying. There are delicate glass earrings, abstract hunks with space-like scenarios and dreamy bubble-scapes, mandala-patterned plates and thick hefty salmon.

The salmon, among other pieces, will be featured in the upcoming Qualicum show at The Old School House gallery with Dave Kasprick of Red Cod Forge from May 21 to June 8.