A Gilded Age for Glass
She and her staff mix metallic pigments with names like 'Mysterious Gold' and 'Metashine Silver Coat' with beads, glitter, mica and seashell flecks to turn glass panes into shimmery depictions of landscapes, fauna, geometric forms and dreamscapes.
She likens the results to paintings that seem to move. 'Slight shifts in one's angle of view render myriad changes in reflection, luminosity and texture,' she writes in the first monograph about her work, 'Golden Glass: Verre Églomisé' (Pointed Leaf Press).
Églomisé, a blanket term for painting and gilding on glass, is named after Jean-Baptiste Glomy, a French 18th-century dealer and craftsman who specialized in the technique. Ms. Ellner's team has applied it to flat, rippled and bubbled glass for doors, windows, wall and ceiling panels, backsplashes, tabletops and folding screens, among other objects and architectural elements.
During the tour of her workshop, which has views of pedestrians streaming along the High Line, her fingernails were manicured in burnished gold polish. Her staff was collaborating on wave-pattern églomisé bands commissioned for a powder room in a Manhattan apartment. Snippets of gold leaf, more delicate than butterfly wings, fluttered on the work tables.
A team member let me help break up some sheets of mother-of-pearl, which snapped with satisfying crunches.
Ms. Ellner, a Brooklyn native, previously worked as a modern dancer and designed sets and costumes. Around 1990, she shifted her focus to églomisé, after discovering the technique while studying decorative arts in Belgium and England.
'I was captivated by its ephemeral, mysterious and alchemic qualities,' she writes in the new book. The monograph illustrates her collaborations with celebrated designers. Michael Simon assigned her to wrap a chimney breast at a home in Arizona with simulations of striated stone blocks. For a Chicago residence by Jayne Design Studio, she scattered églomisé sheets with patterns of leaves and postcard views of Chicago. At a library that Celerie Kemble designed for a Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Manhattan, Ms. Ellner's glass ceiling looked like open skies.
In the book, Ms. Kemble describes the Kips Bay installation as an ever-changing 'centrifuge of clouds, running water and tree branches, which felt as though the roof had been lifted off the building.'
Ms. Ellner sometimes comes up with new design ideas before she has figured out the pigment formulas needed to realize the proposals. Her initial noodling, she said, is along the lines of, 'How the hell am I going to do that?'
Lately, she has been experimenting with sculptural collaged panels that she calls 'memory shards.' They are made up of fragments of leftover panes. 'I grouped them together, and then I smashed them,' she said.
And she has been pondering how to incorporate gemstones and minerals into her work. I observed that I was curious about what Ms. Ellner's églomisé on the work tables might look like six months from now. Ms. Ellner replied, 'Me too!'
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