Artist etches a niche
Owner of local glass business sharpened her skills in N.M.
Linda Cassara, owner of Osprey Originals on Folly Road, watches as Carey Garner loads a door etched by Cassara into a pickup truck. Garner was helping a co-worker who had come to pick up the door for his parents' house.
Some of Cassara's smaller etchings, in the window of her Folly Road studio.
Linda Cassara journeyed to the desert to study with the masters.
It was some 10 years ago, she said, when after taking an adult education class in glass etching, Cassara traveled to Santa Fe, N.M., to refine her skills. There, she spent a week with well-known etched-glass artists Norm and Ruth Dobbins. When she returned, she began doing etchings through Osprey Originals, her custom etched- and stained-glass business.
Originally from Lancaster, Pa., Cassara studied social work in college and worked for more than a decade in the pharmaceutical industry, but she had dabbled in painting and needlework. Another adult education class had launched her stained-glass work 30 years ago, so the progression to glass etching was natural.
"(It's) something that really clicked with me," she said.
Today, Cassara does glasswork for homes and businesses. Her designs adorn windows, doors, room dividers, shower doors and fireplace screens, among other things. Some of her work is at Roper Hospital and Tristan restaurant.
Osprey Originals began as a hobby, and Cassara said she sold her first pieces to friends. Soon, she was selling her work part time; eventually, she left the corporate world to work full time in glass design. When
Cassara, 62, and husband Frank moved to Charleston six years ago, she built her Folly Road studio and further devoted herself to her craft.
Cassara's work entails a central irony: She uses implements of extreme power to create pieces of extreme delicacy on an incredibly fragile material. To etch glass, she uses a sandblasting nozzle powered by a 60-gallon compressor, which shoots a silicon-based abrasive at the glass. As she works, Cassara wears something like a space suit with a helmet connected to a fresh-air system.
The process results in elegant designs such as flowers, wildlife -- often birds in marsh scenes -- and geometric patterns. She compares the craft to painting except that painting involves adding to a surface, while etching is a process almost like carving on a miniature scale in that sandblasting wears away the glass ever so slightly.
Because etching is like painting, Cassara said she can etch anything she can draw. As such, her portfolio includes dragons, a yacht, loggerhead turtles and a pregnant yogi. Cassara takes photographs to be models for her sketches, but she often finds pictures on the Web. She recalls researching a specific kind of gorilla for one customer's order.
Though she still does stained-glass pieces, Cassara said most of her work is etching. The art form offers greater freedom and room for highly intricate detail, she said.
"It's a utilitarian kind of art that you can see every day," she said. "I had somebody say to me one time, 'I don't know if I want to spend this much money for a shower door. I'm the only one that's gonna see it.' My answer to her was, 'Well, my shower door is etched, and every morning when I look at that shower door ... it makes me feel good. It's beautiful.' "
The etchings in her pieces alter and control the light that passes through them, creating changing effects that shift along with the movement of the sun (and moon). Sometimes, a window that looks out onto a natural scene creates the illusion that Cassara's etching -- a horse, say, or a heron -- is part of the landscape. Some of the antique-style glass she uses is textured or distorted in some way so that the view is warped into something like a painting by an Impressionist master.
Many of Cassara's pieces serve as the artistic capstone of a new project, a final aesthetic accent. People usually come to her at the end of the construction process, she said.
"Usually my work is the last thing they think of," she said. "It's the icing on the cake."
Reach Josh Rosenthal at jrosenthal@postandcourier.com or 937-5502.
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