John Fitzsimmons has recently installed "With Quiet Eyes" a painting in the landscape. The piece is a painting on layers of glass that is located on a wooded trail near the Secret Garden. The sculpture transmits, reflects and changes with the light. An outdoor reception, open to the public, was held on Saturday, Octohellber 13 from 4 to 6 pm.

“With Quiet Eyes” is from a poem by Frances Shaw in the introduction of the book “The Quiet Eye” by her daughter, Sylvia Shaw Judson. A book about “divine ordinariness, a delicate balance between the outward and the inward”.

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“With Quiet Eyes” is a landscape painting that stays in the landscape and reflects and reflects onto the area around it. The hard geometric form is intended to contrast the surroundings at times and disappear into the surroundings at other times. The glass reflects, filters and transmits the ambient light. The painted colors produce color by optically mixing and both transmit and reflect color.

The non-descript site on a wooded path in the “Secret Garden” was chosen so the viewer would happen upon it versus a “grand” site. The site was disturbed as little as possible and even the leaf litter was put aside and replaced around the glass so the glass appears emerge from the ground. The surrounding area was not pruned or altered at all.

This painting came out of two different commission proposals. One was for the Trump Towers pedestrian bridge in New Rochelle NY, where I was to turn 3200 square feet of glass into painted “stained” glass that would turn the bridge into a brilliant tunnel of color that would change as the light changed through out the day and night. The other proposal was for the Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse, where the front windows will be painted in layers so that pedestrians and drivers on the street in front of the building will see changing colors and patterns as the sun shifts during the day and the internal lighting projects outward at night.

The painting is made up of 3 sheets of ½ inch thick tempered clear glass on an aluminum and concrete foundation that is hidden below grade with a glass cap plate. The “Z” configuration allows the four pieces of glass to support each other. The glass was painted with translucent lacquer as it was assembled and the image is a loose rendering of the view through the glass from a particular vantage point. The first piece of glass had mostly the yellow image components on it, the second, mostly the red, and the third, mostly the blue. As needed green was added and all three colors were used on the non-respective sheets of glass as needed to produce the effect desired.