Roger Thomas Glass

A Little About Roger

Roger V Thomas making the perfect cut on a piece of glass
Making the perfect cut…

Roger Thomas was born in Los Angeles, California in 1951. He began working with stained glass in the 1970s, and by the 1980s was developing his own innovative techniques with fused glass. After moving to Portland, OR to take a job at his favorite glass factory in 1988, he established his second studio and began to “make things” in earnest.

[pullquote]It’s an accident that I’m an artist. As a self-professed “maker of things,” I join a large portion of the human race in believing that it is good to build. With age, after enough history and experience sinks in, the temporal nature of building becomes apparent and I am left with the realization that it is the effort, not the object, that gives merit to the doing. Art is the detritus of the creative act, and creating is a worthwhile goal for my life.” – Roger V Thomas[/pullquote]Roger is something of a charming curmudgeon. He finds the familiar errands of life stressful and irritating, but thinks nothing of spending an afternoon wandering the neighborhood with camera in hand. And while on these walks, he’ll find beauty in the typical trees and flowers and gorgeous sunlight of Portland, but also in the oddities—the plastic horses chained to the old carriage rings in the curb, the kitschy yard lights, sidewalk chalk drawings and the weeds growing in the parkways.

He brought this same dichotomy to his artwork. Easily distracted by color, design and structure wherever he went, he attempted to extract the essence of form with a graphic shorthand in order to communicate his view of the world to others.

And he chose to do this with glass, a medium so belligerent and unyielding that it creates a narrow set of confines for him to work his will on. It demands whoever wishes to master it learn to work their own magic.

These techniques were second nature to him, enabling him to create pictorial and abstracted images while allowing the glass to voice its own true nature. He stated that he wished to know his medium as well as the Asian calligraphy master, who, after a lifetime of study, bends the ink to his desires and expresses the world in a single brush stroke. Or single kiln-firing.

Roger approached glass as a sculptural medium and ended up creating masterful paintings.    Rog-Resume-button


The Roger Thomas Glass Studio was located in Portland, OR

For a while, when he first moved in, he decorated the windows of his garage doors with the ID numbers of train engines, trying (in vain) to recognize a pattern and predict the pitch and tone of the next whistle. Luckily, he gave up that endeavor and went back to glass.

Ingrid the Studio Dog kept watch over her master’s domain. She made certain no mailman, cat, coyote, or vicious bunny comes anywhere near the studio unmolested. She also spent a great deal of time grumbling over the lack of walks and ball-throwing in her life, but was perfectly willing to offer up a word of advice or succinct criticism when called on. Her words of wisdom and updates were found under “News from Ingrid.”

The gallery at Roger Thomas Glass
The gallery at Roger Thomas Glass

The studio was a life-long dream of Roger’s. The space wasn’t exactly perfect of course. He didn’t have his tile-lined, drain-in-the-floor room for cold working, or achieve his goal of putting every piece of equipment on wheels (though he was very, very close). However, Roger was able to keep three out of four kilns running in one area and he no longer needed to use a miner’s head light in the dimmest corners to seek out the proper colored sheet of glass as in his previous basement studio.

The gallery upstairs was a unique blend of those pieces that he was unwilling to give up just yet, one or two that other galleries have returned, and the newest, most exciting works that have just come out of the kiln were hung and admired before being sent off.


OPB art beat logo
Roger’s featured on OPB’s Art Beat!


AIEPUnited States Embassy, Ankara
Art in Embassies Exhibition Catalogue (PDF)
Ankara, Turkey (PDF – pp 10-13)


OR-HomePortfolio, Oregon Home Magazine
Landscapes through the Looking Glass” (PDF) by Beth Olsen

am_weblogo_sm3-OBoston’s Culture Magazine
Crossing Boundaries, Making Art” (PDF)
by Rebecca Tuch


SWA-head

“Artists to Watch,” Roger V Thomas (PDF)
SWA Selects, Southwest Art Magazine


GlashausWb
Glasshouse/Glashaus

Roger Thomas at the Easel
 (PDF)

by Geoff Wichert

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