Jeff Sherman

Glass Art That Goes From Gazing To Glazing

Jeff Sherman is a part time glass artist living in western Pennsylvania. He shares his time between making glass art and teaching theatrical lighting technology and design.  As a native of Pennsylvania Dutch country, Jeff also has a deep connection to the natural world. Both his love of light and the outdoors have combined in the medium of glass that for hundreds of years has allowed naturalists to bring home undying models of exotic flowers and astronomers to gaze into the deepest heavens alike.

Jeff tends to enjoy making items that are at once beautiful, and also purposeful. He has a love of making marbles, but truly began to revel in it when he noticed that they can make magical night lights.  While standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes, he realized that he could make a pyramid sculpture that could also serve to dry his zip top bags. Making baubles for the holidays may be great fun, but isn’t it that much better to use those same ideas to make a hummingbird feeder to hang from the porch?

On any given evening you might find Jeff in his shop, not as you might expect, running back and forth from furnace to bench with hot glass drooping from a long pipe, but rather sitting at a work bench in front of a flame melting and twisting rods of clear and colored glass together into a form. This style of glass blowing is called flame work or lamp work and affords the artist the ability to create far finer detail in pattern than those who work at the furnace making larger scale objects. This technique is also how blown glass Christmas ornaments were first created in Germany in the 1800s.   

Jeff has been attending Christmas in the Woods as a spectator for nearly 20 years and is delighted to be able to join his fellow artists for the first time in bringing a taste of Christmas spirit to all of you in the golden days of autumn. Look for Jeff in booth 134.