The Verve: Stained glass artist will show at Green Bluff

The Green Bluff Apple Festival will include a new addition later this month: the first Art on the Bluff at Townshend Cellar.

It’s a new venue for the Art on Broadway show that has been held for the past three years at Shear Illusions Salon in Spokane Valley.

Stained glass artist Aleta Wiedenman is looking forward to it.

“It will be nice to spend time with Mother Nature and a bunch of talented artists,” she said. What she’s most looking forward to is inspiring others. “Creating art ignites my imagination and lifts my spirits with hopes that it does the same for others.”

Wiedenman grew up in central Montana where, in high school, she took every available art class. She then went into the stained glass business in the Denver area. “Eventually, the market got saturated,” she said. Then she moved to Aberdeen, South Dakota, to study art and education at Northern State University. It wasn’t easy; a single mother to three children, she never received a degree though she had plenty of credits. She moved to Montana, and then 8 years ago settled in Spokane. “I made a lot of ‘great escapes,’ ” she said.

Now, in her home in the Garland area, she plays with glass, sketching designs on paper and cutting the fragile yet strong medium freehand on a light table. Her work is free-flowing – rarely contained in a frame – giving the final pieces organic edges.

“I let the glass speak to me,” she said. “Stained glass is a wild thing that I strive to tame into free-form, free-standing or hanging designs to avoid breaking its spirit.”

She calls herself a glass whisperer. “It is extremely mesmerizing and it provides unlimited creative possibilities.”

At Art on the Bluff where, besides offering her stained glass creations, she will be joining other artists in the Scarecrow Gallery, offering her version of a scarecrow: ripstop nylon patched together like pieces of glass. Other works at the show include paintings, jewelry, pottery, sculpture, mixed media, rock art, gourd art, and fiber art.