Stephen Cone Weeks
Glass has always fascinated me. When I was sixteen I worked in a studio for stained glass in cologne. The glasmalermeister who taught me always claimed I was more interested in drawing than in stained glass and in some ways he was right. In fact, what interested me was the space behind the glass: the way the lead, the imperfections in the glass, and the schwarzlot lines and surfaces obstructed and obscured that space.
At the art academy i worked with drawing and lithography; after graduating i focused entirely on drawing on paper until – wanting to return to my favoured medium – I found a way to draw on plaster on glass which led to my present multi-layered glass drawings.
All my work – on paper, on glass, and more recently with film – is highly narrative. My task seems to be to tell a story of some kind; but it is a story I do not know. Telling it “in the dark”, unable to discern the deeper layers of significance of the abstractions and realities I create, is both a torment and a joy. I draw to make something visible which is inaccessible to me: the space behind the glass.
At the art academy i worked with drawing and lithography; after graduating i focused entirely on drawing on paper until – wanting to return to my favoured medium – I found a way to draw on plaster on glass which led to my present multi-layered glass drawings.
All my work – on paper, on glass, and more recently with film – is highly narrative. My task seems to be to tell a story of some kind; but it is a story I do not know. Telling it “in the dark”, unable to discern the deeper layers of significance of the abstractions and realities I create, is both a torment and a joy. I draw to make something visible which is inaccessible to me: the space behind the glass.
