Blog

Spreading Sea Glass up the Coast! On the map with New Hampshire and Maine.

June 27, 2025 by jgdefalco

Inspired by the incredible feedback I had resulting from the Chronicle episode and from individual and group studio visits over the last few years I made a commitment to myself to get my work out to more locations. Over the winter, I expanded my reach down south. Now it’s time for New Englanders to come out and play. With a big push out the door, I hit the road with my work and landed in two new places this week!

A visit to Edgecomb Potters in Damariscotta, Maine launched a new relationship with the Maine Pottery Company in Portsmouth, NH and Portland, ME. After several hours of sharing work with their team yesterday, they have work on display as of today, June 27th. What a fabulous team of dedicated artists who run the stores! I feel confident that they will represent my work well. Please visit these wonderful galleries that are showcasing a wide range of pottery and many other incredible artisan works from all media.

Exciting new places to find Cape Ann Designs!

June 17, 2025 by jgdefalco

There’s nothing more exciting than launching my work out into the universe! Now that we’ve kicked off the season with the Cape Ann Artisans Spring Tour, I want to make my work available to as many people as possible in key locations. If you are visiting Rockport, check out my new display at the Emerson Inn near the front desk.

A great way to pick up a memento of your visit to Cape Ann. The Emerson has a new chef and great plans for the summer including several Moonrise parties! If you are looking for my Garden Steppingstones in particular, I am thrilled to have a wide selection now at Sea Meadow Gifts in Essex! Georgeanne is doing a wonderful job displaying them right out front. Pop into the fun gift shop and be delighted by all she has tucked away inside. She will also have alligator clips, earrings, and other hair and jewelry pieces from my collection for sale inside the jewelry case.

And if you just walked the beach and didn’t hit the tide right to find sea glass, then you can stop at the front desk of the Vista near Good Harbor Beach and pick up a bag of sea glass! And of course, you can visit my studio by appointment or during our summer, Cape Ann Artisan Mini-Tour just announced on Saturday, August 9th.

Exciting Moments with @Chronicle5’s Visit to Cape Ann Designs!

May 2, 2025 by jgdefalco

On March 31 and the morning of April 1, I had the great honor of hosting the team from Chronicle5 in my studio. It all began with a humble “form” that the producer filled out on my website and found its way into my email in early March. I was a bit suspicious that this was just too good to be true – but it was the real deal. Lucky for me, they decided to focus on Gloucester and I was the first person with whom they spoke. I did my best to recommend a wide variety of Gloucester’s interesting places and people with interesting stories. But they had done their research and to their credit, they are fabulous as digging up the great stuff.

And so, how to prepare for this? Honestly, they really did not give me any guidance. I just knew they wanted me to do a demonstration of making work. That in itself was a challenge as nothing happens in a 5-minute period – but usually takes a week or more. So, I set about to make all types of hair accessories and jewelry in various stages. The next challenge was doing a low tide sea glass walk. So, just as mother nature would have it, that had to be on APRIL 1st at 8AM. In case you don’t remember this cruel April Fool’s joke, it was 34 degrees with 30MPH winds that day. Putting the microphone under my jacket to hide it from the wind really didn’t make a difference. Kendyl, Richard, and I were frozen on Niles Beach! I didn’t find too much sea glass that day – but they were great about letting it be as it is – a diminishing resource.

Erika Tarantal was a delight. With her family background in the arts, she was a perfect companion to work with me on a piece. Honestly, we really had fun – and I did everything possible to make their visit easy and be responsive to their questions and helped with any introductions. I was thrilled they visited Rocky Neck Cultural Center and the Salted Cod for the art-focused segment. It’s not easy to create the off-season picture for Gloucester – yet truly, this is the most prescious time of year for many of us. Equally, the incredible focus on GMGI, Backyard Growers, the Bowling Alley, the Beauport, and Joey of GMG’s tour of downtown show the diversity of our community. Key word here is COMMUNITY – a place we love calling home. Following are links to the art-focused video and the other videos for all to share!

Formations – Paving the way for 2025

January 26, 2025 by jgdefalco

Formations: Paving the Way for 2025!

I love sculpture. So, it’s natural that sculptural elements enter into my sea glass art. Over the past year, I have leaned into working with highly unusual sea glass formations – pieces that are so interestingly molded by the environment, it’s almost hard to see what they were before. Then, working with these pieces on their own or in conjunction with other oddly shaped pieces, something truly wonderful emerges!

This focus on using the most unusual pieces in my collection applies to both wearable art and my newfound direction of garden steppingstones and sculptures. In the realm of wearable art, I made about half dozen new pieces that look significantly different from the existing collections. In the garden décor realm, I have the opportunity to work with the rarest finds in my collection – bottlenecks. Many were too big or heavy to use in jewelry, but are perfect to form sculptural pieces. Now my sea glass treasure hunt begins anew! This gives me an incentive for digging back into my forgotten pieces to see which ones have been neglected in previous design intervals.

Some of the wearable art pieces that evolved out of this new direction include:

Formations also makes me think of other concepts. Formations of new ideas. Formations of opinions. Formations of a point of view. Evolution into a place that has been formed over time. Re-formation. Formulas. Forming new relationships. All of these forms of formations are what I will look forward to in 2025!

Sculptural pieces are emerging as fabulous formations in their own rite!

The Power of Community in Life and Art!

August 1, 2024 by jgdefalco

When I looked back at when I last wrote a blog, I was shocked to see if was in the early Spring! Clearly, I was completely immersed in preparing for the July 6th Garden Tour. The local tour, put on by the Generous Gardeners is not your average Garden Tour. It aims high in both purpose and results. The funds raised from this tour (tickets and sponsorships) plus special events put on several times a year (Dahlia sales, plant sales, etc.) are to raise money to beautify many of the public spaces in Gloucester from the traffic “islands” to the grand swath of land along Stacy Boulevard home to our precious fisherman and fisherman’s wives statues. The group has nearly 100 volunteers that actually do all the work.

When I was asked a year ago to be on the 2024 tour, I knew the gardening preparation would dominate my Spring. I also knew I had to so some special things to combine the art of gardening with my sea glass art. The result was a series of sea glass steppingstones that I plan to sell at the event and in my studio. Beyond this, I also used this new “direction” to create a piece for the Cape Ann Museum’s Cape Ann Blossoms show. Working with fellow Cape Ann Artisan, Deb Gonet, we made a non-organic sculptural piece for the show inspired by Fitz Henry Lane’s painting “Rough Seas.” If I hadn’t followed the steppingstone path, I would have never been able to do this. Fast forward, the piece was entered into the Marblehead Arts Festival and accepted by the jury into the sculpture exhibit. It is now in its 3rd home as part of the Wenham Museum’s “Art Grows Here” exhibit in a raised bed in front of the museum and it’s for sale with a percentage going to the Museum if it sells. Who knows where it will next land!

Getting back to the Garden Tour, after all the hard work, the experience itself was simply gratifying and joyful. The group is totally professional and well organized with excellent communications. The week before the official tour, I had a chance to view the gardens of the other people on the tour – many are neighbors. I was SO impressed with all the work everyone had put in and the wonderful surprises in their gardens. And it has to be noted that many adjacent neighbors who were not officially on the tour upgraded their gardens too. As we had shared many stories while preparing and afterward, the experience brought us all closer together. At the “after-party” to thank the volunteers, many of us continued sharing our stories. Among the favorites was the incredibly successful lemonade stand run by the grandchildren of one of the neighbors on the tour. If you missed the tour, there’s a wonderful video created by the North Shore Horticultural Society.

My studio was open during the tour. I had steppingstones downstairs with two lovely friends who volunteered and sent people upstairs where I shared my work and space. I so enjoyed meeting new people from all over and also seeing community friends who had never been to my studio. I can’t wait to see some of these faces back again when they have more time. I was truly grateful to those who left with a piece from my collection, and I donated 20% of my sales to the Generous Gardeners.

I cannot express enough how honored I was to be part of all of these community events and programs. The Cape Ann Museum’s Cape Ann Blossoms is so elegant and thoughtful. The Generous Gardeners Tour is intimate and engaging – opening up visits to neighborhoods in Gloucester that no one even knows about. The volunteers in Marblehead were incredibly welcoming. The Wenham Museum is a delightful and very important cultural asset on the North Shore and so inventive in all it does. What I’ve experienced is that community drives art and art drives community. The two are inseparable and equally important. On Cape Ann and the north shore, we have both in abundance!

Stepping into a Spring full of Sea Glass!

April 20, 2024 by jgdefalco

It’s been a busy winter to prepare for an even busier Spring! My theme for 2024 is Wearable Art for All Seasons. We don’t have to wait for the sun to enjoy wearing our sea glass. In fact, it’s a great way to celebrate the joys of summer year round! Speaking of the sun, admittedly, I did make a quick trip down south and am pleased to announce an expanded presence in Naples, Florida at a gallery just across from the Naples Botanical Gardens, Things I Like by Catherine. The Gardens and the gallery are both part of the Bayshore Arts District. During my recent visit, I attended an event to raise money to create even more space for artists in that area. Wishing them the best of success!

Closer to home, I enjoyed being part of the Rocky Neck “now” show where for the first time I entered a piece from my new collection, “Stepping Out.” My sea glass garden steppingstone sold during the last week of the show! They are now available locally at my studio and also at Cedar Rock Gardens! See the various sizes and shapes available here on my website.

As for Wearable Art on Cape Ann, in Gloucester, you can find it at the Cape Ann Museum. NEW LOCATION in Rockport is Gallery Number One! The work will be there as of April 22nd. The Grand “Re-opening” will take place on Friday, May 17th.

And speaking of the Cape Ann Museum – along with fellow Cape Ann Artisans, I am honored to be presenting a piece at the upcoming Cape Ann Blossoms show the weekend of May 3-5th. I am partnering with encaustic and mixed media artist, Deb Gonet to create a sea glass sculpture based on my steppingstone concept while Deb is focused on the floral-like part of the sculpture. The Museum gave us a choice of Fitz Henry Lane paintings and ours is “A Rough Sea” painted in 1854.

When I first saw this painting, all I could think about was what was going on below the surface of the sea! There had to have been a tumultuous mixing up of old bottles down there. The combination of this thinking and the intense colors resulted in a selection of glass and bottlenecks to tell the story in an exciting new sculptural piece. Here’s how it began! Click on the FHL Painting to run through the slides.

My studio on Thurston Pt. is open by appointment, and I plan to have several one-day Open Studios. The first one will be Friday, April 26th. Look for special promotions on Fabulous Fridays! The studio is refreshed and there are plenty of choices of hair accessories and jewelry! Hope to see you here or at the opening in Rockport at Gallery One!

Finally, be sure to “save the date” July 6th for the Generous Gardeners Garden Tour & it will take you right to my front steps here on Wheeler’s Point!