Gloria Eslinger

As a child growing up on a farm in a rural community, I didn’t realize I was “learning challenged”. What I knew was drawing and painting became a fluid and seamless way to express myself and feel connected with those around me. A desire to show others how art might help them engage in their community led me to become first an artist in my own right, then an art therapist. As an art therapist I utilize visual arts with clients who are unable to express themselves through the conventional mediums of speech and language. I view my work as a facilitator, creating safe spaces for people to connect with themselves and thereby reconnect to their community.

My choice of mediums as an artist has greatly expanded. Painting in acrylic, gouache and watercolor was the basis of my craft. Currently my repertoire of mixed media work and stain glass mosaics takes front and center stage. My style could be coined as abstraction with a hint of realism, but I would like to think that everyone of my works is a study in color, sinuous line, and eye pleasing form.

I believe art is a method to communicate with my audience in the most direct and immediate way. I am a tactile artist. I create with traditional mediums, but I shake them free of their conventional milieu to create something unexpected. In the case of the medium of stained glass, many early windows obscured natural light because the methods to produce sheets of glass were primitive, and glass was restricted to small pieces held by heavy pieces of lead, called caning. My work, utilizing modern techniques, allows the medium of colored glass to appear lighter, break boundaries and transform spaces. When creating in glass I am continually aware of the immediate and emotional impact on the viewer. By thinking of how light and color will encompass the entire space which houses the glass, I invite the viewer to become a participant, rather than simply stand back and see the piece from one point of view. By using abstract rather than allegorical or symbolic shapes, I encourage people to find their own particular meaning in my work.