Nighttime water view with Great White Heron and Daytime water view with Great Blue Heron and Monarch butterfly. Installation located in a private home on the water in Onancock, Virginia, 2019.
The Scoop About The
Artist.
Traditional
fine art studies at The Maryland Institute College of Art focusing on drawing, painting,
and printmaking are the foundation of Ilene Richardson’s creativity. While her
concentrations in fine arts shifted decades ago, Ilene became a glass artist incorporating
the myriad of colors and textures in handmade glass as a stained glass artist
and later, as a glass bead maker.
Every section
of stained glass is chosen for its elegant quality of color, shadow, and light
illuminating from within. Ilene approaches stained glass and glass bead making
through the eyes of a painter, appreciating tonal qualities in glass seeking
precise combinations of hues within endless colors of glass.
As a glass bead
maker, Ilene creates glass beads in the flame, handling molten glass while
teasing it into balance around a steel mandrel, and letting temperature,
surface tension and gravity influence the end result. These elements known as
lampworking gather in unison, fulfilling Ilene’s artistic need to create depth,
movement, and emotion through glass.
After earning
a Bachelor’s Degree in fine arts from The Maryland Institute, College of Art
in Baltimore, Maryland, Ilene easily departed big city
life discovering her artist’s energy thrived living along the beach. Years
later, Ilene’s art training continued at Eastern Virginia Medical School in
Norfolk, Virginia earning a Masters Degree in Art Therapy, exploring creative
processes in depth, helping people understand life through their own art
making.
Ilene
Richardson lives on the water in Onancock,
Virginia surrounded by sailboats
and coastal inspirations. She draws her creative energy from beach and
waterfront living and while spending decades by the water’s edge, in time came
Ilene’s unconscious realization of the impossibility to live anywhere other
than along the coast with ocean, bay waters and everything they encompass in
nature.