It is just after daybreak at the Pilchuck Glass School fifty miles north of Seattle. In the middle of a tree farm, the school overlooks the Skagit Valley and Puget Sound, a magnificent setting. The hot shop--glassblowing studio--is a pad of concrete under a pitched roof of rough hewn shingles: Several furnaces are cranked up to 2,200F.
Open to the air and stepped down from the surrounding walkway, the hot shop is like an amphitheater--an apt setting for the performance that is about to begin. The players, a handsome cast of athletic young artists, are assembling. The director is Dale Chihuly, a 45-year-old cherubic pirate with his corkscrew curls and black eye patch. The script calls for the cast to make what Chihuly calls "soft cylinders"--blown-glass vessels that are inflated, misshapen cylinders with elaborate drawings composed of bits of glass, Navajo blanket-inspired motifs gone mad with the heat. The audience of glass students, artists, and collectors are about to witness one of America's best-known glass artists at work.
Top of His Craft
Chihuly, by all the measures of success in the art world, is at the top. His work is in nearly a hundred museum collections in the United States and abroad, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan. He is represented by one of the leading galleries in Manhattan's Soho--Charles Cowles. In December he showed his work at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs at the Palais du Louvre in Paris, only the fourth American to be honored with a one-man exhibition there. He is the subject of a recent lavishly illustrated monograph, Chihuly: Color, Glass and Form. And his works fetch up to $25,000.
How does a boy from Tacoma, Washington, the son of a butcher and union organizer, become a charismatic leader of a movement that has made the art world newly aware of glass? This success story began when Chihuly was an undergraduate at the University of Washington in Seattle, pursuing a degree in interior design. He first used glass in 1962 in a "Design and Materials" class taught by Steve Fuller, where he fused stained glass. Then in 1964, in a required weaving course taught by Doris Brockway, Chihuly was given the assignment to use a material foreign to fiber in a weaving. Chihuly again chose glass, bits of stained glass incorporated into an open hemp weaving, a piece that still hangs in his mother's Tacoma house.
After graduating in 1965, Chihuly continued experimenting with glass. Because he was intrigued by pictures of glassblowing he had seen, one night in his basement studio he melted some colored glass in a rudimentary ceramics kiln and with a bit of pipe, blew a bubble--miraculously it worked. He was fascinated by this unique process: No other material can be blown to create forms. While many are captivated by the romance of the process, Chihuly is "fascinated by the end product." This fascination has formed the basis of his work for the past twenty years.
After his basement experiment, he determined to attend the University of Wisconsin where Harvey Littleton, considered the father of the American studio-glass movement, was teaching. After a year in Wisconsin, Chihuly took an M.S. degree and accepted an offer to go to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to study and to teach glassblowing, beginning an
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