Art

Beautiful Broken Glass

Lynne Lovely creates works of art in Wakefield

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It’s not a stretch to say that stained-glass artist Lynne Lovely lives in her studio: asked how many hours a week she works, she replies with a straight face, “All of them.”

Not only does Lynne spend countless hours in her spacious basement workspace, but the tools, materials and products of her craft are everywhere you look in her Wakefield home. A stairwell is lined with antique electrical insulators, old bottles are tucked into kitchen shelves, basins in the garden are filled with scraps of sea glass, and of course the sunny windows are hung with examples of the artist’s own uniquely three-dimensional work.

Lynne’s stained-glass creations frequently incorporate repurposed materials like antique medicine bottles, bullseye glass and even bits and pieces of old glassware milled and rounded over decades spent in the sea. Nautical themes dominate – boats, mermaids, shells and fish dangling from lures bought at the local Benny’s (a counterpoint is found in another panel featuring a fish with no mouth, “so it can’t be caught,” says Lynne).

With more than 4,000 varieties of stained glass available, and the local beaches spitting up new sea glass every day, Lynne has a nearly endless supply of materials and ideas to work with, although her mermaid panels and stained-glass star window hangings are popular pieces that she must keep well stocked. “That’s why I can never do anything new,” she jokes.

Lynne never really aspired to art. She went to school at URI as a textiles major and only becoming interested in stained glass after taking a class in Atlanta while she was working as a buyer for a clothing company. She recognized the need for a lifestyle change when her son, Tim, now 25, was born and got licensed as a home daycare provider. But when she found herself slipping downstairs during nap-time to work on glass, she realized that it was time to take a chance on turning her hobby into a profession.

It’s not glamorous work, in fact, Lynne describes it as dirty, time-consuming and dangerous. “I cut myself every day,” she says. But despite the frequent nicks, Lynne finds joy in the craft, and her life is hardly solitary: there are frequent visits by the neighbors, her son, Tim, the companionship of the family’s many dogs and the opportunity to teach her craft to her daughter, Amy, 21.

“She learns from me, and when she needs money she comes by and makes some stuff,” Lynne says with a laugh, adding that Amy is her invaluable partner at art shows and has established an Etsy site of her own online.

Stained glass shouldn’t be something you can only appreciate in a cathedral, so when Lynne brings her work to shows she doesn’t just display her big pieces. She makes sure to pack plenty of those $15 stained-glass stars as well as her popular and inexpensive glass necklaces and earrings. The latter don’t make her much money – “This is a very labor-intensive process, and every piece is handmade,” she says – but they do make this timeless craftwork accessible to even the most humble buyer.

Many of Lynne’s pieces can be hung in windows or are themselves fitted into repurposed window frames from old homes (and if they are weathered by the sea, all the better), but some are on a grander scale. One of the artist’s favorites is a five-foot-tall rendering of Block Island in blue and green glass that includes the island’s roads, ponds and a shard of pottery built into the matrix to mark the location of the customer’s home.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Lynne considers herself more of a technician or craftsperson than an artist – a kindred spirit to her father, an aeronautical engineering draftsman whose workbench she still uses. She enjoys the precision of scoring and cutting, and is succinct in describing her work: “Simple designs, beautiful glass.”

Lovely’s work is sold at local art shows as well as Different Drummer in Wickford, Simply Natural in Narragansett, Waves of Creation in Wakefield, Watercolors on Block Island and at Aunt Carrie’s restaurant in Point Judith.

Lovely Glassworks 47 Church Street, Wakefield. 284-0867. lovelyglassworks@verizon.net.

Lovely Glass Works, lynne lovely, stained glass, Wakefield, rhode island, so rhode island magazine, art, artist

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