My Creative Life
- By Driftwood Staff, Gail Sjuberg. October 2001
Artist and sailor Rachel Vadeboncoeur may have become a landlubber in recent
years, but she's still tossed and turned by inventive restlessness.
Her current show of work at Moby¹s Pub brings together a series of
footprints, both physically and creatively, of where she's been in recent
years and where she's off to next.
There¹s several intriguing pieces of photocollage with acrylic on canvas
one of her trademarks in the past couple of years plus new abstract
painting and, an absolute current passion: multi-media stained glass pieces,
both purely decorative and functional.
Vadeboncoeur finds herself unable to settle into production work or even to
take a series much beyond a pair since new ideas keep insisting themselves
into her consciousness. Glasswork now presents a prism of possibilities.
The hooks on Moby's wall had barely been covered with Vadeboncoeur's art a
few weeks ago when veteran artist Jack Avison spied her Golden Spell For M.
hanging glass picture.
As he explained to the Driftwood, he was immediately captivated by the
abstract piece and his reaction was "Wow, I've got to have that!"
Combining variously textured glass some from 1970's-style household
cabinets, with bits of copper mesh, wire and other metal remnants,
Vadeboncoeur has taken stained glass art to a new dimension.
She had done some years ago while sharing a studio with a glass artist in
Montreal, and returned to the craft last year after investing in the
necessary tools.
Then in January, Vadeboncoeur hit a glass artist's motherlode when someone
was leaving the business and she bought their cache of treasures at a decent
price. "It gave me a lot of material to work with," she says.
A sense of depth cascades through some of her pieces which combine two or
even three layers of glass. In those cases, she explains, some kind of metal
reinforcement is needed to give strength to the structure. Adding interest
and intrigue, that can be anything from copper screening to the bead-chains
used in toilet tanks, or plumbers¹ copper strapping.