Susan Hughes Tells Stories Through Sea Glass

CNL2 VIDEO AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE.

Susan Hughes has loved sea glass since childhood when she started hunting and gathering it on the beach next to her family’s beach house in Stone Harbor, New Jersey. She treasures the broken glass that’s been smoothed by water, salt, rocks, and sand so much so she still has in her possession some of the glass she collected as a child.

Today, Susan is a retired elementary school counselor who lives full-time on the west side of San Juan Island. She, like so many artists CNL2 has interviewed, said her creativity exploded when she moved here.

“It’s absolutely beautiful,” she said of her beloved sea glass. “They are like little gems.” She has an attraction to making art with found objects. Before she focused her current artistic energies on sea glass, she initially made driftwood sculptures here. But she said other artists were working in driftwood, and she wanted to do something unique with her beloved sea glass.

“It’s a trash-to-treasure thing,” she said. “Most of it [got there] as trash.” But she explained that shards of glass — tumbling across sea floors and washing across beaches with rising and falling tides — traveling many miles, often over decades, slowly transform into gems. It is their nature to tend to break into triangles. When they are found as beach glass, they have had their edges smoothed, and frosted surfaces, they go into tubs of like-colored pieces and will find their way into her art.

When Susan looks at a piece of sea glass, it makes her think about its journey.

And for the billions of pieces of sea glass that are never noticed? They keep shrinking until they are gone. Having yielded back their sandy nature into the sand on a beach on the sea floor. After all, glass is made of sand.

When searching with friends, she always finds more glass than anyone else — like some people can train their brain to spot four-leaf clovers. But certain finds are more rare and valuable than others. Treasures within treasures. Most prized finds include:

• lavender-colored glass, which indicates it is more than 50 years old; lavender glass gets its color from manganese, and the older that glass its long-term exposure to sunlight changes the color to a deeper lavender, and ultimately a deep purple. No other type of sea glass changes color over time, she said.
• bottle bottoms — the rounded base of a bottle. These are very rare; in all her collecting, she’s only found one intact three or four times
• Portions of necks of a bottle, which often have grooves that once held a cork or bottle cap in place
• Glass pieces more than an inch long, as larger pieces of sea glass are always breaking and reducing
• Glass pieces with writing still visible — giving clues to their provenance
• Other non-glass artifacts, such as sea-beaten shards of pottery, and even what she calls “sea brick”

Susan’s art is multi-media — compositions on a paper surface using the sea glass as tiles. The designs are expressed with lines laid down in ink, paint, or pastels, and can also feature surprise elements such as “wish rocks,” pieces of driftwood, even a sand dollar.

Her subjects are usually nature-related and inspired by views from her living room studio, including the Olympic Mountains, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the wildlife in her front yard. She’s currently inspired by quail. Quail as seen through her sea glass will be on this year’s Studio Tour (June 1st and 2nd). She went through a mushroom phase. She pays homage to hummingbirds. Wildflowers. Blue Heron. Because so much of her inventory is triangular in shape, she tends to see birds in that shape.

She also has used sea glass to honor weddings of friends.

Susan always looks forward to the annual Studio Tour. But she confesses that she and other artist friends feel a bit of panic in the weeks leading up to the Studio Tour. “Do I have enough made? Do I have the right one?”

This CNL2 video is approximately 24-1/2 minutes in duration.