Reverse painting on glass is Wilde at art

Heidi Wilde is the only artist I've ever come across who paints in reverse on glass.

'Reverse painting on glass is an art form consisting of applying paint to a piece of glass and then viewing the image by turning the glassover and looking through the glass at the image'.

You'll find her work on www.wildeaccents.com, under the tagline 'Life captured in a window.'

Reverse painting isn't unique to Heidi, but she's taken it to a far more figurative level.  More specifically, she paints still life, landscapes and animals on the glass of old windows, presumably taken from demolished buildings.  It's a backward form of painting, seeing the undercoats first, but mostly not painted directly from life:

Most of my windows are painted using my original photos as source material, but on occasion I have been known to ask permission to use the work of another photographer.

One occasion when she used another photographer's work was last year.  She came across my old post about 'Curious Cows' and asked if she could use that as the source for another of her reverse-on-glass paintings.  I was flattered, so of course I said yes.  It's not often I get the chance to be  the art world equivalent of a musician's 'sample').

Months later, the result is finished and now on her website and entitled The Curious Case of Inquisitive Cows.  I presume this eight-panel work (octych?) is for sale, but she doesn't give the expected price.  

I think it looks grand.  (The result, I mean, not the price.  But since it's based on my photo, pure vanity makes me hope the price is rather more than a grand.)

I guess one big advantage of Heidi's technique is that the paintings are ready-framed.  Have you seen the price of frames recently?

Original blog post: Granny Buttons: Curious Cows

Heidi's source photo remains one of the most fascinating times I've communed with animals.  It was on the Macclesfield canal a couple of years ago, between Congleton and Bosley Locks. I'd got 'stemmed up' (stuck aground) and the cows slowly ambled over to investigate my many minutes of trying to free Granny Buttons from the mud.  I switched from frustration with the boat to fascination with the bovines, and their very curiosity seemed to lighten the boat and free it from the mud.

Comments

[Brian]

My uncle use to do this, he was a dab hand with a paint brush. Unfortunatly he is now dead and I don't know where any of his art work is.