Understanding Hard Edge art glass. A deeper dive

When you first look at a piece of Linda’s art glass you notice something. There’s a clarity of colour. A precision of form. A sense of balance that holds your gaze.

Then you look again. And you see more.

What gives it its force? How does beauty move from the surface of the art to something deeper inside you?

Linda finds the answers in the way she works. She trusts her intuition. She doesn’t ask “why” this green sits beside that blue. It simply feels right.

And yet each element matters. Each shape and colour plays its part. Because of this, the whole becomes greater than any single piece.

To understand this sometimes profound experience of colour, of form, of beauty, we need to step back. About a century.

Look at the work of Bauhaus pioneer Wassily Kandinsky.

You don’t need to be an expert to know these works are powerful.

Your eye recognises it instinctively.

And the longer you look, the more sense it makes. These forms are abstract and yet they speak to something much deeper. 

This was the achievement of the Bauhaus art movement in the 1920s.

Geometry turned into meaning. (The Art Story)

The Bauhaus movement didn’t separate architecture, craft and painting. They saw them as one. (Parkstone Art)

Look at the work of Paul Klee, another Bauhaus pioneer.

Klee's paintings often feature buildings. Facades. Windows. Towers. And yet they are all colour and form.

The shapes dance. The colours sing. And the more you stare, the more the architecture you see takes shape as emotion and meaning.

Now take a look at Linda’s Hard Edge art glass works.

Here you see that same architectural logic in glass.

Blocks of colour. Angles. Curves. Edges that speak. Shapes that hold space. And the colours that live inside them.

The eye reacts. You get drawn in. The longer you look the more you see. Elements you missed emerge. Your relationship with the work deepens.

Now let's move sideways

Let’s look into the world of Henri Matisse.

In Nice, Matisse, the first of the Fauve colourists, often painted what he saw and felt when looking out of his bedroom window.

In point of fact the view mattered less to him than the way he wanted to paint life through colour. 

He wasn’t interested in photographic truth. 

He looked for the feeling behind what he saw. Light became part of the picture. Shape became colour. Reality became artistic form.

Without deliberately  intending to, Linda’s work has naturally evolved in a similar way to the Fauves and the Bauhaus.

Her shapes often suggest architecture. Her colours are vivid. Her edges are hard.

At its heart it’s more than function, more than a photograph. It’s about the experience. And it’s done through light in glass.

Her work, in her innovative Hard Edge style, invites you to live with it. To inhabit it. To let the work define your room, and let your room define the work. It’s a reciprocal relationship.

And when colour and form meet with precision and purpose, you see something more than decor. 

You feel character and presence. Quite unlike the 30-second viewing experience you typically get in a gallery.

And in that presence you recognise the difference between art you ‘observe’ and art you really live with.

That’s the difference between passively observing art and actively living with it.

When a piece of Hard Edge art glass - a concoction of colour, form, light and glass - sits in a space and you move around it, watch how the light hits it, notice how your eye travels over it. Something shifts inside.

It stops being a picture you simply look at. It becomes part of you, part of the room, part of your experience, part of the moment.

'Strelitzia and Sakura' - Glass Art By Linda

That’s the magic.

This transition is what’s meant by “living with” the artwork. It’s not just decoration or something you admire from afar.

It becomes something you live inside and keep with you.

The presence of the piece adds to the room, your mood, and your life.

This is understanding Hard Edge art glass.