Greg Chase
There’s something about the shotgun homes of the Marigny and Bywater neighborhoods that I find captivating. The simplicity of design coupled with the creativity of their owners makes for a magical photo walk. When I started doing mosaics I knew this is where I wanted to start.
I use mostly Bullseye and Oceanside stained glass for these mosaics. The vibrancy and opacity work well for the rich colors of the neighborhoods.
The Orange Shotgun House was the first mosaic I made. I’d worked with stained glass making windows for many years, but it had been a few decades since I’d cut glass. Though I love the simplicity of design of shotgun houses, my natural inclination toward detail meant I needed to cut every slat of wood. The result worked well for me.
The Cat Art House started out much the way the Orange Shotgun House had before it. I loved the colors and had just the right stained glass for each. The windows are done in Van Gogh glass which was a new one for me. It’s a textured glass that has had a colored silver backing applied to it. As for the cat, every photo walk I’ve been on in the Bywater has been accompanied by the neighborhood cat population. It had become something of a running on line joke amongst my social media followers that the feline community was out to get me. It was only after I’d cut the black cat silhouette that I noticed in the original photograph that a cat head had been scrawled on the sidewalk. The placement worked perfectly as it looks as though the black cat has just completed the graffiti.
Though not the largest, the Crepe Myrtle House was actually one of the most complex mosaics I’ve made. Organic shapes are much harder to create in glass than straight lines. A tremendous amount of grinding went into making each random flower cluster and leaf background fit together. The shutters are a unique type of Bullseye glass that is both textured and iridized. Like the Van Gogh glass of the Cat Art House, it was a first for me.
Brick House is actually a building in the French Quarter. Brick between beam construction is one of the oldest construction methods in New Orleans. My love of detail demanded that I make every brick. As a bow to my cat followers, I included a ghost cat silhouette alongside the house. That and my signature are a form of glass decal that gets fired to over a thousand degrees in the kiln making them a part of the glass.
