Square One

Glass Roots

On a late-summer morning, the sky above glass artist Steve Heine's eastern Jefferson County studio is a blue-gray malt of sun-hiding clouds. Inside, Heine [one of five male siblings who make up Louisville's Heine Brothers' Coffee clan] is surrounded by abstract, elegant glass compositions of differing shapes and sizes.

In the midst of this profusion of glass and diffuse light resides the culmination of what can happen when an artistically inclined architect pushes himself beyond the reaches of traditional design. Multi-layered glass compositions are the focal point of the studio. Using an optically clear glue that cures under UV light, Heine laminates dense layers of small glass elements [either pieces of prismatic glass or a blue dichroic glass] to an underlying base sheet of glass.

"I fully laminate glass," he explains. "It's incredibly labor-intensive. I use between two, three or four underlying base sheets of glass. This provides a total of four, six or eight surfaces with which to work -- a visual story builds in three dimensions."

A graduate of the University of Kentucky College of Architecture and a former student of Glassworks' Kenneth vonRoenn, as well as a studied writer under Kentuckians James Baker Hall and Gurney Norman, Heine believes in a subtle balance between disciplines. He describes his work as a symbiosis of small-scale architecture and creative writing, and approaches each commission like a small piece of fiction, a short story for and about his client, composed of glass and light.

"[When] clients call, I show them my portfolio of drawings, slides and three-dimensional prototypes," he says. "We discuss various techniques for composing glass, color [and] the movement of the sun relative to their home or business."

By using a Louisville couple's elementary-school report cards, Heine created a glass "story" capturing each individual's transformation over time.

In their commissioned piece, The Grade School Reports, Heine layered architectural glass to create a seamless, multi-dimensional canvas, across which "light continually transforms itself, reverberating in a wonderful display of text, deepened beyond a single written page," he explains.

Heine's work is currently available by commission only. For more information, contact the artist at 895-7681, or by e-mailing .

Katherine Dale

[Photo by John Nation]

(This story appeared in Louisville Magazine, October 2002)

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