Lise Gonthier uses glass as a pictorial medium, playing with its smooth and textured surface qualities and its ability to be both transparent and opaque. Gonthier combines several techniques to create her art works, smaller sections are hand blown and used to compose the larger glass ‘canvas’. The final configuration is then heated again in the kiln to melt the sections together and bond them as one. The aim is to join them but not loose the detail of each section. The works are to be viewed as glass paintings, suggestive of oil painting and more formal painterly materials and mark making, challenging our perceptions of this medium.

Gonthier discovered glass blowing in the Czech Republic after her studies in painting at the ’Beaux-Arts‘ in Besançon. She was trained at Cerfav (European center of research and studies for glass art). Following courses in France and in Europe, Gonthier went on to open her studio in Beaucaire in the South of France.