“They just show me the space they have and the idea they have, and they wait while I bring them something.”
Victoria BalvaWhen Victoria Balva first came to Canada from her native Ukraine, she began her stained glass career in what she derisively calls a “mass-production company.”
“The reason I decided on stained glass was we could do everything: Murals, mosaic, large-scale, small-scale,” she says.
Stifled by the rote predictability of her day job Balva, with help from her husband, struck out on her own.
For more than seven years Balva’s company, Artistic Line Studio, has created hundreds of stained glass projects for customers in and around the Greater Toronto Area, including skylights, doors, bathroom windows, wall dividers and domes.
Unlike her former employers, Balva’s customers give her absolute freedom. “They just show me the space they have and the idea they have and they wait while I bring them something,” she says. “And the more crazy ideas I develop, the more they like it.”
One of Balva’s recent projects relied on materials that larger-scale companies had dismissed as garbage.
“They were sides from very expensive glass just put in the corner and sold by weight,” she says. “They sold the beautiful glass for hundreds and this for nothing.”
Balva bought the discarded pieces and used them to create medium-sized panels, incorporating the pre-cut edges of the glass into her designs. The panels quickly sold out at multiple conventions.
“Each day after the show we returned to our studio and worked until 3 a.m. and next morning we were at the show with two, three new panels that we sold during the day,” she says.
Her current project is a glass mural for the chapel at Father Michael Goetz Secondary School in Mississauga. “It’s been a long-time dream for the school,” says Balva.
However, school planners had a very specific location in mind: The front of a glass block wall, which cannot support panels. As a result Balva plans on using steel cables to suspend the mural, creating the impression of a three-dimensional object floating in the air.
“I will never say that it is not possible to do a project,” she says. “We just need to find the right way to design and fabricate it.”
In the future Balva would like to design more public art projects similar to her work for Father Michael Goetz Secondary. She retains her belief in the value of stained glass for the home, however. “Decorative glass plays the role of architectural jewel for our buildings,” she says.
For more information, check out artisticlinestudio.com.
