 The Denver Post February 14, 1998 By: Joanne Ditmer Denver Post Staff Writer The note from the kindergarten teacher to her mother was short and specific. “Don’t ever let her stop drawing.” And Sharon Shuster Anhorn has never stopped drawing. But she also works with stained glass to create haunting, ephemeral pictures with a fairy-tale charm, and she explores and experiments with metals to craft unusual repousse’ objects. The relief design is formed by being pushed or beaten from the underside. She creates bas-relief murals of copper touched with gold, depicting a family’s history or Ute Indian legends. Other metals make elegant folding screens, and there are embossed, one-of-a-kind custom frames for the stained-glass scenes or mirrors. “I’ve worked with stained glass for 25 years and also became very fond of New Mexico tinwork,” Anhorn said. “I thought the two would work well together but didn’t have the dollars to get someone else to build frames for me, so I struggled through my first one. “The more I worked with metal, the better I liked it. I like the metal and glass together….Both capture light in the same way and enhance each other. I never thought I would connect again with a material as I did with glass 25 years ago, but metal affected me the same way.” Anhorn’s stained-glass pictures do not hang in a window with light streaming through to illuminate the colors. Instead, she uses the stained glass like a pigment against a background to create her pictures, sometimes adding aluminum foil behind the glass to reflect light and give a new dimension. The glass is mostly American, though some is German. Bits of found metal, glowing drops of iridescent antique glass jewels and gold leaf are unexpected and glittering accents. For almost 20 years, the artist has recorded her dreams and then looked for interpretations in Jungian philosophy. “I believe there are messages in the subconscious that help us with our daily problems,” she said. Then nine years ago she went to a workshop on mandalas, an Asian symbol of the universe used as an aid to meditation in the Hindu and Buddhist religions. Jungian psychology interprets it as a symbol representing the effort to reunify the self. She began to create mandalas, typically in the form of a circle enclosing a square, in glass and metal. She incorporated the emotion that inspired the picture or its commission. Creating the mandala is a meditation for herself, but the resulting mandala is sometimes astonishingly unexpected and perceptive for the client. One client had lost both his parents in one year and was devastated. He asked Anhorn to do a mandala and accepted her suggestion of a hopeful, celebratory one. “I met a friend at the Butterfly Pavilion, and as we walked around, I thought, “That’s it, a butterfly, and its metamorphosis,’” Anhorn said. The resulting design, with a butterfly on the wing and a chrysalis on each side representing his parents, was “joyful, as joyful as could be.” The client was pleased. “He said, “That’s wonderful, it will go with my mother’s butterfly collection.’ And I never knew his mother had a butterfly collection,” she said. |
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Another client, recently separated from her husband of 27 years, was depressed and angry when she asked Anhorn to make a mandala that would help center her life. The artist decided it should represent feminine power, so she crafted a sun in the soft creams, rose, ivory and pinks of an early dawn, with glimmering glass jewel accents. “The client said that just contemplating it brought her peace of mind,” Anhorn said. Another piece with layers of meaning was a family portrait created with different metals and copper enamel. The family is shown in a boat on the Sea of Life: The father is a doctor, so healing rays come to him from the sun; the wife is the true sailor in the family, so she is at the tiller; the young son is searching for what he wants to do, so he is shown fishing for his passion; and the computer-expert daughter has glass jewels at her fingers representing the keyboard. For a ranch family, she created a 9-foot-wide panel of repousse’ copper for the master bedroom, depicting all six members of the family, including a newborn baby, with five horses and a colt. Sacred stories on panels For a home in northeastern Colorado, built near a mountain where Native Americans have long held sacred ceremonies, Anhorn researched Ute legends, then crafted copper and gold repousse’ panels that illustrate sacred stories. The panels are a glowing horizontal band at shoulder height around the chapellike living room. One of her early customers was the late John Denver. She also has pieces in collections throughout the United States, Canada and England. She often includes a verse she has written, or from someone else, or an appropriate quote, with her picture. She sketches the piece, then assembles the design. For the repousse’ work, she uses wooden instruments to press on both sides of the metal to give it a three-dimensional quality. Typically the copper is heated, and where the heating process stops determines the color of the metal. For example, when it is heated “way up,” copper becomes glowing reds and golds. Then composite leaf is used for the accents. Mostly she works alone, but when she needs assistants, she uses “wonderful, wonderful students” from the Colorado Institute of Art. On some pieces she does the design, has someone else fabricate the piece, then adds the finishing touches of gold and antique glass jewels. Minor in anthropology Anhorn was educated at the University of Colorado and the University of Denver, with graduate work at the University of California at Los Angeles. She minored in anthropology – “I’m so glad there’s such a thing as required courses, I’d never have taken it otherwise” – and found “an epiphany” as she worked in her art. “I’m realizing how connected anthropology is to fine arts…I never could separate the two once I realized that.” Her pieces range from $1,500 to $6,000. She shows at the Hoff-Miller Showroom in the Design Center. Anhorn is a devoted researcher, studying art from all cultures, and is fond of the elaborate golden paintings by Austrian Gustave Klimt. Typically she has some 30 books – “Not one mystery!” – checked out of the library at a time. “I bombard my senses with these images. I’m a visual addict, need to have my senses stimulated with new things,” she said, leafing through and pointing out pictures in a half-dozen oversize art books on the dining table where she does most of her preliminary sketches. Once in awhile her research lets her down, but she can laugh at the gaffe. For the University of Denver’s century-old University Hall, she was commissioned to make a metal panel for a new entrance on the north side. The original stone entry was engraved with the Latin phrase for science and religion. “I wanted to put my two cents in and wanted to add ‘For truth’ on the new panel, so I engraved ‘Pro veritas.’” A Latin professor went to the chancellor and said it was conjugated incorrectly, so Anhorn corrected her panel to “Pro verite “ (sic: pro veritate)…then enlisted help from a learned DU librarian in writing a letter of apology to the chancellor – in Latin. |