From a young age, Vanessa Lee Abraham couldn’t get enough of anything that sparkled, interacted with light, flowed, or just had a magical quality…stickers, glitter, prisms, suncatchers, water, and of course, unicorns. Such intriguing, ever-changing visuals inspired her to focus and imagine. And be calm. It wasn’t until her forties that she started to explore her artistic side and ultimately fell in love with inks and glass. Both mediums exhibit independence in their transformative states. This mercurial quality required Vanessa to surrender to a serendipitous process.

Vanessa applies alcohol inks to a variety of surfaces and fuses glass to create wearable and functional pieces. In 2019, she combined her two favorite mediums, inks and glass, for a commission for the Akron Business Awards. Her alcohol ink painting of the view from Overlook in Cascade Valley Metro Park was chosen to represent the 4 of Clubs in Akron on Deck II. Vanessa has also been a featured artist through ArtsNow, a non-profit organization that supports arts and culture in Summit County. 

Vanessa embraces stillness within her art process. She hopes that her pieces inspire the same response in others. The chatoyancy of the dichroic and iridescent glass pieces is as mesmerizing as the sparkly stickers of her childhood and she believes that others will be drawn in by their radiance too. She finds the inks fascinating as they demonstrate the beauty of fluid dynamics and tend to depict microcosms, macrocosms, and also, other-worldly landscapes.

Vanessa’s home studio, Gazing Glass is in Akron, Ohio.