For people familiar with the glass arts, the name Ginny Ruffner connotes bold lampwork sculptures with provocative titles like Unified Playing Field Theory, Driving Across the U.S.A. with an Expired Artistic License, and The Goddess of the Neon Tetras Shows off Her New Oven Mitts. Ruffner's art, however, also reaches beyond the world of glass, to sculpture and painting and the public arena. What underlines it all is Ruffner's irrepressible humor, curiosity, and total passion for living, a passion that turns her life into art almost as fast as she lives it.
Believing in Fun
Ruffner is like a bundle of dynamite with an overlay of Southern softness; a woman who clearly believes in fun. But underneath the soft drawl and charm is an intense artistic drive, revealed in an impressive array of accomplishments and honors: a B.F.A. cum laude and a M.F.A. summa cum laude from the University of Georgia; a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1985); an NEA fellowship (1986); instructor and artist in residence at the Pilchuk School of Glass in Washington State since 1984; keynote speaker, Ausglas Conference, Melbourne, Australia (1989); pieces in five museums, including the Musee des Arts Decoratif, in Lausanne; the Corning Museum in Corning, New York, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City.
Ruffner works in a variety of mediums--paint, paper, metal, and glass--but it is her lamp-worked sculpture that has so far brought her the most acclaim. Although she began her art career in painting, she was moved to try working with glass as a canvas when she saw The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, a painting on glass by Dadaist Marcel Duchamp. Working with flat glass led to blowing glass and eventually to lampworking.
Ruffner's early lampwork was abstract and had no color; a great deal was left to the viewer's imagination. According to Ruffner it incorporated "linear logic without humor" because "you have to be serious when you are right out of graduate school." But in 1984 upheavals in her personal life promoted major changes elsewhere. She decided to leave Atlanta and move to Seattle, and she decided to start painting on glass.
To make her glass sculptures, Ruffner heats glass rods and tubes of borosilicate, which is close to optically pure, over a gas flame of 2,000 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the glass melts and is turned, it forms a ball at the end of the rod, which can then be manipulated with brass and graphite tools. Blown forms can be made by blowing into the heated tubes of glass. Ruffner makes her sculpture in parts and then assembles them by reheating the glass at the point of juncture until they weld together. After they are annealed, they are sandblasted so that they have a "tooth" similar to drawing paper, which provides a surface to which color can be added.
Frequently, a single piece will incorporate paint, pencil, and marker dye in various layers, according to the amount of transparency and intensity that is needed: "With this method I can layer a pastel over a watercolor and get not only a beautiful and different color, but I can get a different transparency that you can't get with anything else. There are layers and layers of imagery and there are layers and layers of paint, and I hope, layers of
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