Learning Curves

Conference half day, we spent the afternoon at the Escher museum in The Hague where we learned quite a lot about the processes he used. How wonderful to be so close to so many original images, and the building itself was fascinating, originally built as a Royal Palace. However, the lasting and most memorable image for me was this stunning glass sculpture by an artist I had never heard of, in a medium I had never really thought about before. Titled "Gap, 1" and dated 1968/2004, it is made from cut, ground and polished glass by the artist Vaclav Cigler, who is, I later learned, 83, Czech, and one of the foremost artists in optical glass for the last 40 years. I love the way the window and blue blind is distorted and reflected in the clear glass so that what you can see through the art work becomes part of the art work itself. Beautiful.