There are three new artists that have been juried in to the Studio Tour community. They represent three unique artistic visions. Welcome Lisa Ashton, Danielle Corsetti and Rod Glover. We’ll feature each in our next few blogs.
Rod Glover takes the age-old craft of pressing flowers to a revolutionary new scale and artistic direction in his large botanical collages and assemblages. If you’re trying to figure what that looks like, head over to his website (bird&bevan.com) and your idea of pressed leaves and flowers will be taken to a whole new artistic level.
His journey to arrive at this stop in his life has been varied but always creative. The connecting thread (a pun since his degree was in Fibers) runs thru weaving, making paper, framing and abstract painting. Rod’s spent the last year getting set up in a small
building nestled in the bucolic Shepherdstown countryside. Everything is white and bright and minimalist but nature is displayed everywhere - sticks, cones, nests and more. Large white tables are covered in dried botanicals of all sorts. There's a large professional press and a separate framing workspace.
At this most recent fork in Rod’s life path, he decided to combine two of his passions. “I knew I could do lots of things but it all comes back to paper,” he says. “I could combine that with another passion, botanicals.” What has he learned in the past year of non-stop making? “It takes a lot more work and expertise than you first think. Even gathering. You can’t collect plants in the hot sun or when it’s too humid. You have to learn how to press – for how long, under what pressure depending on the thickness and wetness of the material. What adhesives and UV protectants are best for different materials?” Every plant has its idiosyncracies.
He loves isolating the flowers and leaves in his pictures and shadow boxes. “There’s so much we take for granted in the natural world. By isolating them, we can really appreciate their individual beauty.”