Julie Marton: Beaded Mosaic Vessels

"Mucha's Halo" custom large decorative bowl 18x18"

Julie Marton creates one-of-a-kind decorative beaded glassware for ArtFinders. Several of her pieces shown here were custom items created to complement specific interiors.

Biography

Julie Marton’s glass art works are handcrafted in her studio in suburban Chicago. She is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After college, she began her career as an art consultant and went on to art gallery management. In 2000, after the birth of her first daughter, she began working for a Chicago area art, design, and architecture museum. As the museum’s program director, she had the opportunity to curate many exhibitions of regional, national, and international artists and artisans, as well as administer the museum’s annual national architecture awards and international design competition.

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Throughout her career she has been creating and refining the method and design of her personal body of work, a unique line of embellished glassware.

Her mission is to create inspirational, hand-embellished glass vessels that delight the viewer and are functional works of art. She perceives her work as "sculptural paintings" employing the varieties of colors, translucencies, and lusters intrinsic in glass beads to enhance the shape and volume of the glass vessel.
It is important to the artist that she reuse existing materials whenever possible. She has made it a point to give new life to secondhand glass vessels and vintage or salvaged beads. Only a percentage of each art work includes vintage beads, but Marton especially prizes the mellowed patinas of vintage beads and is constantly on the hunt for them.