We encounter it day in and day out.

We look at it and touch it dozens, if not hundreds of times daily.

Without it, our lives would be far darker, less comfortable, and probably a good deal less healthy as well.

We almost never stop to really look at glass.

But when we do, we immediately realize how amazing it is – simply to look at.

It’s elusive – almost like air. It’s there, and we know it’s there, but sometimes it seems like it just isn’t.

It can allow images of objects behind it to pass through unchanged, or it can shatter the image into a small explosion of reflections and distortions.

Against a dark background, highlights on the surface can seem to dance in thin air, while in other places ghostly reflections float as if in an indistinct mist.

Above all, it has an astonishing ability to transform light that passes through it, scattering, refracting it into a rainbow like a prism, and reflecting it in a myriad directions.

Artists love to paint it, and apparently we always have; some of the still life fresco paintings discovered in Pompeii have glass pitchers filled with water. It’s clear this distant artistic ancestor had the same fascination I do with the way in which glass twists and distorts the world behind it into magical play of scattered forms and shimmering lights.