Through the Looking Glass

Yardley, Pa., mixed media artist Colleen Attara exhibits her ‘Conversation Windows’ at Zebra-Striped Whale in Newtown, Pa.

By: Megan Sullivan
   Whimsical flowers with winding stems dance delightfully within brightly colored vases painted on glass panes of old, forgotten windows. The carefree shapes are brought to life in vivid hues of purple, blue, pink, red, yellow and green, like caricatures of roses, daisies and tulips growing wild.
   "I love how the paint looks really creamy against the glass, almost surreal to me," says Yardley, Pa., resident Colleen Attara as she looks at her mixed media artwork. "I think that’s what makes this interesting — a lot of people paint windows but they look very real and I’m not even remotely trying to kind of be real."
   Ms. Attara allows art to jump out from her "Conversation Windows," using Plexiglas flowers, wire and decorative beads. Old windows act as the canvas on which she creates quirky, fun and uplifting one-of-a-kind pieces. More than 60 windows sit in her garage waiting to be resurrected with acrylic paints and a creative mind. During the past three years, Ms. Attara has sold more than 100 of her windows, which cost anywhere from $350 to $1,000.
   A handful of Ms. Attara’s three-dimensional windows are being featured at Zebra-Striped Whale in Newtown, Pa., through mid-December. She proves the adage that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure through recycling these old windows into bold works of art.
   The seed for her artwork was planted a few years ago after she left her job as a TV advertising executive in Philadelphia to stay at home with her two young children, now ages 7 and 10. "I just felt like other people were running my life, other people were taking care of my children, cleaning my house, doing everything," she recalls.
   Planning around her children’s school schedule, Ms. Attara took art classes at CAPS! in Yardley to keep her creative juices flowing, which stretched her to try new things. She began designing whimsical cards inspired by her daughter and the hobby grew into something larger — her Conversation Windows. Ms. Attara maintained the same attitude and artistic flair used when making the cards, but transferred these energies into her unique window pieces. "I’ve always been really creative, but when there was actually quiet and I could just think, I wasn’t just running to and from all the time, that all this started to come out of me and I couldn’t stop it from coming out," she says. "It’s really, really fabulous."
   Her work is featured at Monkey Hill interior design shop in Lambertville and Zephyr Gallery in West Windsor and Atlantic City, among others. Ms. Attara’s artwork also decorates area businesses like Salon Metro in Morrisville, Pa., and Newtown Dentistry for Kids. She teaches art classes at CAPS!, geared toward children ages 10 to 15, on how to make three-dimensional window creations. "They are wildly creative and they really influence me," she says of her students.
   Ms. Attara’s most recent piece, on which she just put the finishing touches, rests on an easel in her home where she lives with her husband, daughter and son. Standing tall, the window has 12 square sections filled with a bunch of flowers climbing out of a purple vase. She points to paint splotches that have stained the throw rug on top of the hardwood floor during times of creative frenzy.
   About 200 Plexiglas flowers sit within a small cardboard box nearby, freshly cut and ready to be painted at any moment to fulfill a new artistic vision. Up until last week, she had been tediously cutting her flowers in the garage but has luckily found a company who will make them for her in bulk. "It makes it so much nicer and I think it makes me more creative because I have a horde of them and I can just paint them," she says.
   The just-finished piece, "Forty One," is one in a series of windows that came from a house dating back to the Revolutionary War. The house, called the Dietz House, was the only structure left on a piece of property in Yardley purchased in the 1960s by the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart. The nuns gave Ms. Attara a group of windows that came from the Dietz House, which had a secret room believed to have been part of the Underground Railroad. "It’s a lot of fun to take something that’s so old that has a history and then totally change it," she says. "I’ve always liked windows, I don’t know if it’s the fact you can go in and out of them or that you can see in and see out, or what they tell."
   And Ms. Attara has plenty of bare windows waiting for her to tackle, ready to tell a different story through each fanciful flower and painted pane.
Colleen Attara’s Conversation Windows are on view at Zebra-Striped Whale, 12 S. State St., Newtown, Pa., through mid-December. Meet the artist: Dec. 2, 7:30 p.m. For information, call (215) 860-4122.