Greg Chase earned his college degree in Studio Art from San Jose State University in 1983. For the last forty years, he’s been pursuing art in one medium after another. His experience with stained glass, however, began well before his formal education. He would sit, entranced, watching his father build art windows on the family’s dining room table. After college, he spent two years with the Peace Corps in Ghana, West Africa. While there, he worked with village potters as part of the Ghanaian University of Science and Technology’s extension program. Boiled down to its basic component, his education and experiences have resulted in an appreciation of the world around him as components for his creativity.

He picked up stained glass as a hobby not long after returning to the states. A handful of years later, he discovered hot glass and  found a way of getting back at the merciless stained glass medium for all of the cuts it had left on his fingers. Hot glass elevated his hobby to a profession that lasted for fifteen years.

Just before the pandemic caused a shut down of New Orleans, he’d picked up a camera to capture his love of the city. The joyous images of Mardi Gras were quickly followed by haunting shots of the French Quarter in complete lock down. Showing the pictures on social media provided him a way of connecting with other people during a time when in person interactions were all but forbidden. Shooting boudoir images provided him another way of connecting with people in a completely unique way.

He considers making these images into glass mosaics a way of connecting numerous points of his history.