2001 Sylva Petrova:
“It appears that means (craftsmanship and technology) themselves become the goals and therefore many glassworks lose one aspect that everyone pretends to include in them: artistic expression… It may be this fact that makes some of modern art’s world renowned personalities convinced that glass as a whole does not deserve their attention.”
Petrova, S. Czech Glass. Gallery Prague, 2001.
2001 Sheila Farr:
"Tacoma is building a $63 million Museum of Glass, scheduled to open next summer, and with a name like that, you'd expect the first show to be, well - glass, right?
To that director Josi Callan has a prompt reply: "Don't forget the colon."
That colon precedes the rest of the museum's title: International Center for Contemporary Art.
And one of the museum's opening exhibits will have nothing at all to do with glass. Expect that kind of programing to continue.
At a walk-through of the site yesterday, Callan and architect Arthur Erickson unveiled a glimpse at a bold structure that will offer more than a place to display and create glass art. It's evolving as a wide-ranging institution that could offer strong competition to other regional museums, including the nearby Tacoma Art Museum.
It's a long way from the seven-year-old original concept as The Chihuly Center for Glass, Callan said.
"We don't use the words `glass art' or `glass artist' here," she insisted yesterday. "We feel that it marginalizes the artists." Although glass impresario Dale Chihuly was associated with the original idea, he plays no role in the museum now. "He's just a good buddy, a good friend," Callan insisted."
Farr, Sheila. "Museum on the rise Tacoma building has art of glass ... and more. " The Seattle Times (Seattle, WA). (Sept 7, 2001): B1. General OneFile. Gale. Seattle Public Library. 1 Apr. 2009. Gale Document Number:CJ78021210
2001 Matthew Kangas:
"Two artists of differing styles and materials, Hank Murta Adams at Elliott Brown Gallery and John Moilanen at Two Bells Tavern, offer their versions of representational art. Both condense and abbreviate recognizable imagery, but with distinct results.
Adams, 45, lives in Troy, N.Y., but has long ties to Seattle and the Pilchuck Glass School, where he studied in 1981 after graduating from Tennessee Tech in Cookeville, Tenn. He also spent significant time (1988-1994) as head designer at Blenko Glass Co. in Milton, W.Va., and has had solo exhibits of his cast-glass sculptures in New York City, San Francisco and Vienna.
Adams' status as a major American glass artist has a lot to do with how he handles a perplexing problem: how to bring up the size and scale of work that tends to be diminutive due to technical details such as the size of glass-furnace openings. Unlike Pilchuck artists Dale Chihuly or William Morris, Adams is not a glassblower but a glass-caster. In his new work, he attempts once again to complicate people's expectations of what glass can be. He does so, this time for his fourth Seattle show since 1986, by combining cast-glass elements with cast-plaster ones, and assembling them all with copper staples and wires.
Although all the new works share this material combination, there is no sense of the usual unending series approach, where glass artists do the same piece over and over. Instead, some of the works are wall-mounted, some pedestal size. Some employ found objects for which molds have been made before the glass or plaster is poured. Not wholly original, Adams is borrowing his found-object idea from better-known glass artists like Howard Ben Tré, Richard Posner and, above all, the late Italo Scanga, but he brings to the process his own identity.
In a few of the wall pieces, such as "Isolate," "Block Trinity" and "Knuckles," black and white glass and plaster shapes are in symmetrical compositions closer to design than abstract art.
The pedestal pieces fare better, mixing references to antique American glass bottles, ornamental Jell-O molds, animal decoys and even perhaps a well-known Swedish vodka bottle. In these, the Philadelphia native faces a bigger challenge for sculptors — how to make the front and back of the sculpture equally interesting. Despite silhouettes reinforced by black and white colors, Adams falls short of fully addressing this crucial problem. "Podsticksweetie Cluster" and "Spindlecluster" overcome it, however, and pass the 360-degree, walk-around test: Everything looks good from every angle.
Even better, "Bombcluster" and "Can Call" transcend the arbitrary look of many of the assemblages and suggest, respectively, spent nuclear-waste storage containers and a pile of ominous, portable explosives. If Adams could make his art more issue-oriented — a big order for business-as-usual decorative glass — and build on the strengths of "Bombcluster," the evidence of technical fabrication could be outweighed by deeper meaning."
Kangas, M. "Painter, glass artist break out new works." Friday, November 2, 2001. The Seattle Times.Accessed April 22, 2009. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20011102&slug=visart022001 James Yood:
"Many art media concern themselves with color and light, but at the end of the day these are the trump cards of glass. In no other medium do color and light so suggestively interweave, shifting, changing and endlessly cross-pollinating. Among the most nuanced seekers after the eternally sensual and elusive mysteries of light and color in glass is Stephen Rolfe Powell, whose upbeat vessels for more than a decade have bubbled, blistered and erupted in fugues of chromatic suggestion. He can be seen as an accomplished color-field painter, though he neither paints nor makes color-fields. Instead, his world provides globular prismatic bursts, an irrepressible ebullience of hue and a tintinnabulation of tincture that maintains, as Van Gogh put it, that "color expresses something by itself."
But what's the point of color without form? The pointillist play of Powell's blots of pure color is tremendously energized and reinforced by the very shapes they come to sheathe and define. He makes vessels, round and bulbous, curvaceous and ribald, replete with generous Intimations of the sensuality of the human body. Their lobes and swellings inevitably suggest buttocks or breasts or testicles, the soft and vulnerable zones of sexuality, in a warm eroticism heightened by the fantastic color scheme. The weight of these lobes, the sense of their being pulled down by gravity, is countered by the exquisite tension of Powell's attenuated and elongated necks, which strain upward in some Parmigianino rhythm, as if these vessels were simultaneously bulb and sprout. Through these forms Powell makes color volumetric, enhancing its possibilities[...]
[...]There have been subtle shifts in his work, as Powell tries to push the edges of his process and explore new strategies. The necks of his vessels, which a decade ago were modestly tapered, have recently been stretched close to breaking point and often are as long as the bodies they surmount. He has tried to create larger murrine to ease the transition from neck to body, to have the color of the neck ooze into the body in some handsome attenuation. And his color too is intensifying, as he shifts from translucency to opacity within the same piece.
His titles exude the "keep-on-truckin"' amiability that is at the core of his work. Usually three words long, these curious names-Tangerine Cheeks Smith, Piranha Gasp Johnson, Purple Zippy Mania, Naive Laughing Cheeks, Undulating Groan Jones, Purple Aloof Cleavage, Pyronic Marilyn Monroe- are important to Powell for their free-and-easy patter. A word or two in a title does describe some aspect of the piece-a shape or color or feeling-but the total effect recalls the 1970s sensibility in which this artist was formed.
Yood, J. "Stephen Rolfe Powell." American Craft. June/July 2001. http://www.stephenrolfepowell.com/articles/amercraft/index.html
Accessed April 23, 2009.
2001 Robin Rice:
""The end result is what I aim for -- not the perfection of 'Wow, what an amazing technical feat!' " explains Beth Lipman, a fall, 2001 Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America. Nevertheless, Lipman undeniably wows viewers with the glittering virtuosity of her three-dimensional recreations of 17th and 18th century still life paintings, each incorporating 50 to 100 pieces of glass.
Much of Lipman's earlier work dealt with abundance and excess and, especially, food, which she values as a "universal known thing." An early collaboration with a fellow student combined real food like melted sugar and jelly beans with glass images of lobsters, bread loaves, and fish. The paintings which serve as models for Lipman's current series, "The Still Life Revisited," are rich with meaning and sensuous surfaces. On one level, still life painting traditionally pays homage to the bounty of nature, God's gift to humanity. More superficially but inescapably, these paintings recorded the affluent circumstances of the artist or patron who commissioned them: fine linens, crystal and fresh, abundant food, the stuff of life. Countering this show of vanity, many historic still lifes were vanitas paintings, reminders of the brevity of life, which emphasized fleeting material pleasure as a contrast to infinite, ineffable spiritual joy.
Representations of decadence, decay and waste are reminders of mortality. They include tipped-over wine glasses, insects and the damage caused by them, as well as broken stems and bruises. Split melons in John F. Francis' Still Life with Fruit, one of the works Lipman is recreating at CGCA, seem almost eviscerated, while cascading grapes hang like bloody gobbets. Just as the bloom on a peach fades, so does youth and life. These paintings remind us that though life may be pleasant at the moment and possessions plentiful, "You can't take it with you." Yet, paradoxically, although the subjects of the paintings, their owners, and authors are dust today, the represented scene remains vivid and fresh for our contemplation.
At a third remove from the original living fruit, Lipman's glass versions are even more ambiguous. Glass is solid and almost imperishable, though fragile by definition. Moreover, representing painted objects in clear glass, as she does in her reconstruction of the Francis painting, perversely dissolves solidity in an optically challenging maze of reflections and transparencies. "It's about the essence of the lusciousness of what's going on," Lipman says.
She chose the Francis piece because, John Francis (1808-1886), the most famous American still life painter of his day, lived and worked in Philadelphia where Lipman plans to show this sculpture at the Mangel Gallery in early 2002. For this show, she's also basing sculptures on works by another important Philadelphia still life artist Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825).
The subject of still life attracted Lipman in part because it has always been considered a secondary or lower form of painting -- not as elite, challenging or content-driven as portraiture or "history painting," for example. Glass and fiber (Lipman's other primary medium), are often considered second-class materials for fine arts; so she sees them as akin to still life.
Furthermore, Lipman explains, "I'm a woman working in a material (glass) that 30 years ago a woman wasn't allowed to touch." Her observation reminds us that for centuries aspiring women painters were not allowed to work from the nude (to protect their "modesty"), but still life was considered a suitably ladylike subject and one which was not overly challenging.
Nevertheless, Lipman's glass still lives are challenging and labor intensive. Transcending the pejorative "crafts" label, she presents her work as a consummate complete sculpture. In the hot shop, Lipman works almost expressionistically, knifing a gather of soft solid glass on the end of a metal rod into rugged facets to suggest rather than represent individual, life-size grapes and turning out dozens of peaches in short order. "I'm striving for drawing in glass, not an academic rendition but a translation of objects in my voice and my material." She is not bound to functional perfection when making the props like baskets, spoons and sugar bowls. Lids lack flanges, baskets lack symmetry and slumped spoons are a little flat. In the finished work, they will not be handled. The carefully calculated arrangements of glass objects are permanently mounted on tables built by woodworker Richard McCoy to Lipman's specifications.
An admirer of outsider art, Lipman describes herself as a "craft child," who frequently helped her mother with tole painting and other similar projects. At one time, she disdained the decorative "country" craft aesthetic, but now she respects "the humility of making utilitarian decorative objects" and freely borrows useful techniques. For example, she painted crosshatch tole stokes in fire-on enamels to give a basket in the Francis work a sense of texture.
The most ambitious piece she began at CGCA was a version of Wolfgang Heimbach's Table Still Life with Maid behind a Window. "This piece will be a summary of how I feel about the viewer interacting with the work," she explains. The glass fruit in the McCoy's wooden shadow box will again be clear. In the painting, a maid behind a cracked window eyes the fruit, perhaps covetously. In Lipman's version, the window will be a mirror reflecting the viewer's contemplation of her three-dimensional banquet, a frozen ghostly array of glittering overabundance in which food and consumption have political and social implications. Though it has plenty of intellectual content, Lipman's sculpture is powerfully seductive. When the viewer is literally part of the picture, it is complete and instantly contemporary."
Rice, Robin. "Beth Lipman" Wheaton Arts, NJ. Creative Glass Center of America. 2001. website accessed May 2, 2009. http://www.wheatonarts.org/creativeglasscenteramerica/criticresidency/robinrice/lipmanbeth
No comments:
Post a Comment