Featured Artist: Greta Schneider, Aurora OR
I have been an artist all my life…..but got into doing glass by accident. I had worked as a commercial artist in Florida and also after we first moved to Oregon in the mid 70’s. Then I got into lapidary work and gold jewelry. One day I was dropping off some jewelry for consignment to the Real Mother Goose, a popular higher end Northwest Art store in downtown Portland….and saw these huge, beautiful, wildly colorful plates on display. My introduction to dichroic glass! I was hooked and had to find out how to get some and how to use it. I became a member of the Local 14 Art Show, selling my dichroic and fused glass, back in the early 90’s and am still active in that group ! Our next show is the first weekend in October in the Miller Hall, World Forestry Center (across from the Zoo in Portland). This will be the 59th show! Pretty amazing!
I learned about the Oregon Glass Guild many years ago after someone told me about the Open Studio Tour and I went to it. I joined almost immediately and was Secretary at one point and have been working on the Newsletter for the last several years. It is a wonderful group.
I love trying lots and lots of different techniques but am particularly fond of working with powders or enamels. My powder work is more abstract and my enamels are usually animals or birds and pretty realistic. I really enjoyed Ted Sawyer’s powder classes a couple of years ago called “How the Work Gets Made” (at Bullseye Glass in Portland) …..it made playing with powders a lot more fun.
We traveled south in the winter in an RV for many years….and I carried a small kiln with me and my grinder so I could make and sell jewelry on the road. That was fun. I’ve done dichroic petroglyph jewelry for the gift shop at Edge of the Cedars (Ancestral Puebloan) Museum in Blanding, (SW) Utah for about 15 years now and also still do some dichoic jewelry for a shop near Zion National Park, but we aren’t on the road anymore. That SW art reflects a lot of the ancient Indian ruins, petroglyphs and other beautiful scenery we saw on our travels through Utah. I am in one of the artist galleries for Delphi Glass, and have been on their catalog cover and in their catalog several times. I was also excited to get into the gift store at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma a couple of years ago.
I don’t do a lot of shows anymore but I want to stay active in the glass art community and this guild.
• I’ll do Local 14’s show as long as I can.
• I helped organize the fundraiser we had at the recent Gathering of Guilds which went really well. We had a lot of wonderful glass art donated to help glass artist Andrew Jagels with medical bills due to a recent diagnosis of ALS. A huge Thank You again to all who either donated, purchased pieces or helped in other ways….. it means SO much! You can still donate at his GoFundMe.
• I’ll be participating in the PNW Glass Guild’s Open Studios Sept. 19-20 at Carlyne Lynch’s studio.
I have NO clue how anyone who has any free time ever gets bored if they have any kind of art to play with. I have far more ideas to try just in glass than I will ever have a chance to really do, I also am hoping to possibly teach a few classes, maybe later in the summer. More info will come out about that later.
See more of Greta’s work in the Members’ Gallery