In this time line I pull quotes to illustrate a thread in popular and scholarly writing and criticism about glass. Here we will see current glass artists defending their art against the accusations and separating themselves from these stereotypes and, hopefully, find out how and where the now-common opinion was born. Fundamentally, the general thesis seems to be born of the question, What Is Art? This question I will leave to others to answer, here I am only documenting the written history of a popular way of thinking and a popular taste.
1986 Sunset:
"Fanciful or functional,
glass as an art form is enjoying widespread popularity. Its light-gathering, flowing character is revealed in nearly as many ways as there are artists working with it. In addition to one-of-a-kind works of art like those shown at right, the array of handmade pieces-- including goblets, bowls, vases, paperweights --is dazzling.
This explosion of creativity has captured the attention of Western art lovers. In galleries, corporate art collections, museums, and studios, exciting new work is on view. Yet modern glass remains both collectible and affordable. Prices can start as low as $20 for a wine goblet or a vase produced in quantity, climbing to $25,000 for a one-of-a-kind sculpture by a well-known artist. For galleries, studios, and museums, featuring glass, see page 99.
Should you decide to try your hand (and breath) at working with glass, we give details about four art schools. Some community and state colleges and universities also offer classes.
Why today's interest in glass?
Until the early 1960s, the expense of building huge industrial glass furnaces and holding them at high temperatures had limited the working of glass to factory production. Then, artist Harvey Littleton, assisted by chemist and inventor Dominick Labino, designed and built a studiosize, relatively inexpensive glass furnace.
No longer was this craft reserved for a select few. Now artists were willing to share as they reinvented old techniques and experimented with new ones.
Littleton taught students at the University of Wisconsin, and some of them-- including Marvin Lipofsky of the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland, and Dale Chihuly, co-founder of the Pilchuck Glass School, near Seattle --started programs on the West Coast.
In the Northwest, Pilchuck (a summer program) is a mecca, as is CCAC in the Bay Area. Both schools attract artists from all over the world. A concentration of glass studios and galleries in Los Angeles serves a receptive public.
Technical advances and the proliferation of artists who taught others helped make possible the subsequent flowering of glass artistry. Also since the 1960s, development of equipment as well as availability of quality raw materials has continued, enhancing the quality of art glass.
What are the techniques?
Basic glass formula contains silica (fine sand), alkali (soda or potash) to lower its melting point, lime as a stabilizer, waste glass (called cullet) to assist in melting. Artists add metallic oxides for color, or other chemicals to vary properties in the finished product. Because it's simpler, many artists today just use cullet. Glass artists use many techniques, often in combination. Here are some of them.
Blow: to shape molten glass by blowing air into it through a blowpipe.
Cased: glass has two or more layers of different colors, with outer layer(s) cut away to show interior colors.
Colored threads: thin strands of glass added in different ways for different effects.
Etch: to create a design by scratching the surface of finished glass with a tool or treating it with acid.
Fume: to spray metal salts on warm glass, which is then reheated to give iridescence.
Fuse: to melt together various colors or designs of glass in a kiln.
Laminate: using heat or glue to join pieces.
Multilayered: a cased-glass technique, adding other colors to a basic shape to create designs.
Plate glass: a clear thick sheet, often with a greenish cast.
Sandblast: to blow or blast sand or carborundum onto a piece; this etches or blasts away layers of glass; masking some areas creates design.
Sand-cast: to ladle glass into a shaped mold made in special casting sand.
Slump: to heat a sheet of glass in a mold until it's soft enough to assume a shape, but not molten.
Wire drawing: a cloisonne-like technique. The artist makes wire drawings, fills in with enamel or bits of glass.
How difficult is it?
It takes a long time to develop skill. What looks easy in a demonstration is much more difficult than learning to throw a pot, and it takes several classes to get predictable results. But even beginning students we talked to felt they were better able to appreciate the beauty of finished pieces when they understood the process.
Working with glass is a team effort full of camaraderie. It's physically demanding, in some aspects more sport than art.
If you would like to try, a number of state and community colleges offer beginning to advanced classes. Among them are Chico, San Francisco, and San Jose state universities in California; Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona; the University of Hawaii; and Eastern Oregon State College in La Grande. Cost is about $170 per quarter, $300 per semester.
Viewing and choosing fine glass
Modern art glass remains both collectible and affordable. Though the work of well-known artists may be too expensive for all but dedicated collectors, new talent surfaces continually; you'll often find exceptional work at beginners' prices.
To make a living, many glass artists devote a few months each year to producing wine goblets, paper weights, perfume bottles, Christmas tree ornaments, vases, plates, and the like at reasonable prices for the work involved. An artist may spend long hours finishing a piece, and making glass is a costly process; gas for firing even a small furnace can run to several hundred dollars a month.
How can you recognize and choose a high-quality piece of glass? Visiting museums and specialty galleries is a good way to start. Museums often have permanent collections, though they're not always on display. Foremost by far is Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, New York. The American Craft Museum, in New York City, will open new headquarters on October 26, and the works in the opening show (including glass) will travel next year to art museums in Denver and in Laguna Beach, California.
Choosing a piece is most importantly a personal thing: you're attracted by its changing optics, its colors, its sparkle. Next study its craftsmanship: look for blobs of glass where they don't belong, edges that don't meet smoothly. And finally, rely on the recommendations of a gallery that specializes in glass."
"Glass as art." Sunset. Sunset Publishing Corp. Oct. 1, 1986. AccessMyLibrary. 5 Nov. 2009
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-4372285/glass-art.html
1986 Robin Rice:
"“Glass has that transcendent property that goes from immaterial to material; from spiritual to physical. Deep in our paeolithic or neolithic mind is the quest for making something intangible or spiritual visible. Glass helps the viewer engage in a similar poetic inquiry.” These are the thoughts of Rick Mills, a second time Resident Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America in Spring, 2004. Perhaps it was an intuitive groping for these truths that first attracted Mills to glass. Perhaps it was a predisposition inherited from a great great uncle who was a glass-maker around 1680. Historically, the decisive even occurred when a graduate student at Ohio State University invited the undergraduate Mills to assist him in the hot shop. There was no salary; just the opportunity to learn and the gift of a collaborative piece at the end of the semester. However, experience led Mills to change his focus from welded steel and cast bronze to sculpture which may incorporate a variety of materials but virtually always includes glass.
Now an internationally recognized sculptor and Professor of Art at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Mills was a Resident Fellow at the CGCA in 1986 “fresh out of grad school” (MFA, University of Hawaii). Glass challenges an artist to invest it with something beyond its innate beauty he says. In the studio, Mills particularly values “the sense of cooperation and camaraderie” that comes from working with others, the “alchemical magic of fire” which he relates to the volcanc activity familiar to Hawaiians, and the serendipity of dealing with a material while it is in flux.
Mills is a thinker, a ruminator, who analyzes and develops ideas over time, looking at them from different perspectives. Similarly, he tends to visually “think” in groups of work which are interconnected formally and conceptually. Although the thematic material in his work is consistent, it does not yield a simple sign system of the A=b order. Mills’ description of his “Vestige” series as “ancient archaeological ambers” works metaphorically but it’s evidentially contradictory. The fossilized resin amber preserves prehistoric insects and plant life in its translucent depths. Within Mills’ “Vestiges,” traces of human life are embedded: tantelizingly visible; yet obscured. The simple, sometimes fractured, tooth-shaped exteriors might almost have occurred naturally, like stalagmites. “They take on a gestalt, more than one identity. It’s the idea of mystery, inquiry.”
Floating or resting near the base of each “Vestige” a human head or skull is accompanied by artifacts, like the fragmentary remains of a burial. These records of human culture, perhaps not coincidentally also represent an encyclopaedia of glass-manipulating techniques: a suggestion perhaps that glass technology itself is emblematic of civilization. Some elements were worked on a blow pipe; others, cast. Multi-colored, patterned areas were assembled from sliced cane. The unpredictable reflectivity of layered glass and various inclusions in the vitreous mass distorts what may seen. The whole is a metaphor for the richness of cultural—of human possiblity, suspended in time and fossilized, long extinct.
The largest work in this series is 54” high. Casting such large and complex objects is a challenge. Mills estimates the failure rate at 50%. He mounts each monolith on a metal base, almost like an enormous jewel in a bezel. However, each base contains a tiny drawer, a place where something “contemporary” might be stored. Could it also be an ironic reminder that glass is often the material of vessels?
The more recent “Midden Series” makes similar archaeological references. Originally a midden was a dung heap. Today, it might be any container of waste. Archaeologists delight in finding the layered refuse of kitchens and latrines, including broken glass and pottery vessels, and other detritus of human life. Consigned to a midden, literal garbage over the centuries is transformed into a magical journal of human daily life. Mills depicts middens as collection buckets: tall, narrow, and composed of stacked cylinders suggesting the drums of columns, as well as layers of excavation. The seven foot tall translucent, slightly irregular tubes are stacked, mold-blown sections. Mills sandblasts the surfaces and patinas them with graphite, allowing him to have direct rather painterly contact with the work. Each has a fragile handle of glass. It looks like a bucket, yet the height and leaning gesture of each column suggests the vertical human figure. The clustering of middens on a rectangular base might remind us of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais or of a grove of tree trunks. Mills’ title Midden Maiden reminds us that Greek columns were proportioned like the human figure. Folds in a woman’s chiton are represented in the flutes of an Ionic column.
“Seed Forms” connect in a different way to the “Vestiges.” These simple shapes contain multicolored inclusions, more abstract and veil-like than those in the “Vestiges” and more varied in profile. Each “Seed Form” is distinguished by a curling sprout-like extension, an elaborately patterned spiral reminiscent of a fiddlehead fern (which in turn resembles the head of a violin another emblem of human culture). The intricate patterning, compressed at the base and expanding toward the coiled tip succinctly suggests life’s magical potential for unfurling an infintitude of detail. Plants are obvious referents, but a kind of consciousness, a sentience, can be infered. The bronze bases resemble those of the “Vestiges.” Each tiny drawer contains a fingerprint: its intricate and unique whorls and arches linked to those in the biomorphic “Seed Form” itself.
Mills has also made many long-legged metal and glass works. The assymetrical taller-than-a-person “Walking Sticks” resemble bent, emaciated metal figures with contrastingly globular glass heads. They may not be human but they seem weighted down by consciousness, by thought, or by memory. As in the “Seed Forms” the line between human and plant blurs.
In the“Vanitas” series, large brilliantly-colored droplet-shaped (perhaps sperm-like) blown glass lidded jars are mounted in tall stands with thin prong-shaped legs. The design of container and support is clearly linked to ancient Greek olive oil storage vessels—yet another archaeological reference. Attenuated arching, whip-like necks, handles on the lids of the vessels, resemble sprouted plants (more mature than the “Seed Forms”). Mills arranges them in conversational groups, once more hinting at sentience.
At CGCA, Mills planned to continue his “Midden” series by moving from the grey graphite-coated surface to more intense color as well as more complex bales (handles). He also planned to sand cast three crates, using real shipping crates he found behind the glass house at Wheaton. This exploration of form might make its way into an installation. Mills has a Buddhist slant “an on-going discussion about transportation and transmutation; emptiness and fullness. I’m not sure where this is going,” he commented, adding “They’re friendly crates—people size.” It was not clear whether he might intend a cryptic reference to the so-called “Greater” and “Lesser” vechicles of Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism. Mayahana, sometimes called the “Great raft,” emphasizes the role of compassion in human relationships.
Mills feels its important to challenge himself with new concepts, moving beyond successful series of the past. “They got too acquirable. I feel a responsibility for being on the cutting edge. When things sell too quickly I feel a little guilty.” In exploring new avenues, he is “fortunate to come [to Wheaton]. The price of experimentation is invaluable.”"
Rice, Robin. "Rick Mills" 1986. Wheaton Arts, NJ. Creative Glass Center for America. website accessed May 2, 2009. http://www.wheatonarts.org/creativeglasscenteramerica/criticresidency/robinrice/millsrick
