STUDIO FOCUS | ERIC HILTON

A wee chat…

Eric Hilton has an exuberance that is cosmic in proportions. He is full of Scottish mirth, but also deeply thoughtful about nature, humanity, and the role of art in understanding both. All of it is so contagious that within minutes of “a wee chat” with him, you will find yourself laughing out loud and climbing inside your mind about profound philosophical stuff.

Hilton’s father worked in the clothes trade and had a knack for making vibrant shop window displays; his mother was a seamstress and knitter. He was five years old in London when World War II began and air raids dropped bombs all around them. When the house across the street was hit, the reverberations shattered their windows, forcing them to take refuge in an Anderson shelter. Before long, they went to live with his grandfather in Scotland (as a side note, Hilton recalls vividly how their train was attacked en route and bullets flew by the windows of the stopped cars).

Hilton working

As far back as he can remember, Hilton was always drawing, always “plunking things on paper.” He loved to draw birds, from books or inspired by his frequent walks in the local woods in Falkirk, near Glasgow, where they eventually moved. He was proud of those drawings until one day he bumped into another kid who, as it turned out, also liked to draw. Back at the boy’s house, Hilton saw his elaborate and expert drawings of battle scenes, knights, and horses and was filled with jealousy. Both men ended up doing glass at Edinburgh College of Art, remaining in fraternal competition throughout.

Hilton still loves to draw and still loves walking the woods, which these days occurs mostly on the 65-acre property in upstate New York where he has lived for 40 years with his wife, Sarah Schantz (on land originally purchased by her parents). Hilton designed their house and built it together with friends, and when he had enough money, he added a studio up in the hills. He lives and works in communion with the natural world. Each time he walks in his woods, they are changed. That cyclical and temporal character is endlessly fascinating to Hilton, whose art explores physical elements, metaphysical energies, and the interdependence of the two. He is drawn to the infinity of the universe, to the mysteries of existence which he constantly investigates, records, absorbs, then interprets in glass.

One day years ago, while instructing students at Alfred University in loading a kiln, Hilton was approached by the president of Steuben Glass and invited for a chat at their headquarters. It was a lunch meeting in the executive lounge, and they had to lend him a tie since he showed up sporting long hair and a hippie shirt. They proposed he submit some design ideas. He had just purchased a derelict property in northern Scotland, its 250-year-old neglected stone house overlooking the Atlantic and the mountains, so he went to Scotland to fix the house and work on some drawings. He trudged to the local post office to send them to America (a place he was pretty sure the postman had never heard of), but three weeks later the drawings came back to him, worse for the wear, and marked “insufficient postage.”

A second batch of drawings made it safely to New York and soon a telegram arrived offering a role as a design consultant and word that a ticket back to America awaited him at the Edinburgh airport. Over forty years later, Hilton is one of Steuben’s most renowned artists; his affiliation with them has produced stunning collectors’ pieces and significant sculptural projects both in the United States (such as Innerland, from 1980) and abroad (such as Creation, first exhibited at the 1990 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan). He used their facilities to create the board room doors at S.C. Johnson’s Council House. From the beginning, Steuben always allowed him room for his own work, letting him loose in their blowing rooms and providing access to tools and equipment he could not afford early in his career. As in independent artist in his own studio, Hilton has among many his many other works executed some dramatic architectural commissions, including sculptures at Rockefeller Center, Queens College in New York, on a cruise line, and in private residences.

A SELECTION OF COMMISSIONS BY ERIC HILTON

Door Double Threshold; Johnson Boardroom Doors; Rockefeller Commission; Phoenix; Vesica; Steuben, Flight of Eagles; Steuben Corporate Sculpture.

In concert with the rugged individual who thrives in wild isolation is an affable and curious artist and experimenter. He is a man of immense technical skill who builds his pieces gradually and thoughtfully through the often frustrating but always satisfying process of molding, etching, cutting, sandblasting, and polishing. Hilton’s glass art pulses with the dramatic light of his native landscapes and resonates with the soulful vitality of his subjects—from animals to the seasons, from geometric abstractions to the cosmos, from mental landscapes to storybook characters. Within each piece are arteries for light and reflection and pathways for the exploration of physical, psychological, and spiritual concerns.

Hilton believes that art creates connections between people. He collaborates with creative types of all stripes from glassblowers to woodworkers and engravers. One of his most invigorating and experimental partnerships is with James Allen, a friend in high-tech with professional credits at NASA and IBM. Allen is also a digital artist, and the two are currently working on a sculpture commission for a homeowner of a converted church, creating an abstracted family portrait in glass where the faces appear and disappear within colorful pathways carved into the material to express familial connections and energy.

Earlier this year, Hilton teamed up with glassblower George Kennard in a live demonstration at Corning, during which they used a special tool to combine two glass bowls together. Little moments like this are meaningful to Hilton, who acknowledges the hundreds of people who used that tool before him and the aura this history endows it with. Similarly, when today he enters the auditorium at Steuben, located in what used to be the factory floor, he can feel the artisans and craftsmen who labored there for so many years. Just as Hilton recognizes the reciprocity between the glass artist and his medium, and the glass artist and his tools, he honors the meeting of the minds between the artist and the viewer. Not surprisingly, he enjoys talking to people about his work. His repertoire of playful stories and charming expressions makes him easy company, but beyond that he appreciates how people personalize a work of art with their own perspective and how art inspires people to new ways of seeing.

Two sides of Spun Metamorphosis, 28.5 x 24 x 7" , made with George Kennard at Corning. Video available HERE

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Available Work

Emerging Life Form, 2023

Collaboration with George Kennard, 8” daimaeter

Alternate View of Emerging Life Form

Large Orb, 2023

Collaboration with George Kennard, 9” diameter

Life Yet to Come, 2023

Collaboration with George Kennard, 10 x 12”

Life Yet to Come, 2023

detail - inside the bowl

Friends, Family, and Canines

Meanwhile, he needn’t go far for personal or creative enrichment. His wife Sarah was an art student when they met at Alfred (she was his studio manager for years), plays music, loves to read, and does photography. His daughter, Erin, lives in the house that used to belong to Sarah’s parents before they passed away, and Hilton has given her “a patch in the studio” where she does incredible animal paintings. His son Kyle lives on the property, too, where among other things he does amazing drawings on his computer. He loves to have his “crazy, sweet, and kind” family close. Early in the pandemic, Hilton had his well-equipped studio to work in and would occasionally “nip out with a mask on” to meet with collaborators; he is now back to his usually busy schedule. Though the pandemic has temporarily halted visits to his magical little cottage in Scotland, he always feels close to his native land and his daily access to family, nature, and art keeps him in good humor. Have a “wee chat” with him, and you’ll undoubtedly emerge a fair bit lighter and whole lot wiser, too.

Hilton takes countless photos of life’s endless inspiration.

Abandoned Ghosts; Cosmic Frog; Dragonfly Eyes; Future: Ice Drawing; Oldshoremore Rocks.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Scottish Artist and Designer Eric Hilton is a skilled master at working glass to convey the aesthetic and philosophical issues that confront artists. “Art for me is a vehicle that synthesizes order into the awe of existence. It is the vehicle for dance, music, poetry, literature and the visual arts. It represents the soul of human consciousness.”

Eric’s true passion is in the creative process in the molding, etching, cutting, sandblasting and the polishing of each work. His process is like painting, as he builds each piece gradually etching and cutting his detailed imagery and patterns over the whole surface. You can find the elements of life – earth, air, fire, and water in his work.  “I am influenced by nature from which infinite information can be gleaned.”  

Through reflection and refraction, lines he cuts with a copper wheel seem to travel from one surface to another, creating an imaginary landscape or map for the mind to travel. Works by Eric have a touch of the magic of ancient times as well as the futuristic plans for places yet to be explored. Scotland has a rich history of tales and Eric Hilton is a great teller of them, both through his art and his wonderful sense of humor and deep appreciation for the mysteries of life.

Cosmic Energy

STUDIO FOCUS | JEN VIOLETTE

A peaceful little oasis…

In a 1920s farmhouse nestled in the rolling hills of bucolic Vermont, with two active boys, three acres of land, and a thriving career as an artist to attend to, Jen Violette rarely has any spare time. She and her “really talented and handy” husband, John Gerding, are skilled doers who renovated the farmhouse themselves over the past 20 years. Violette first learned drawing and woodworking from her father (whose parents were artists) and sewing from her mother, then she studied glass and metal sculpture at Alfred University. John does metalwork, producing his own pieces as well as welding many of the steel bases for Violette’s glass sculptures. Next to the house, in a barn dating back to 1890 that was filled with junk and terribly drafty when they bought the property, the couple has built a studio for Jen, and next to that a workshop for John.

Even during the heart of the pandemic, when she was forced to hunker down and shift her daily rhythm, Violette still had more than enough to do. Her boys, Niko and Bennett, have kept her on her toes since they were babies. When school went remote in 2020, they were in 4th and 5th grade and she took time off from work to help them. Between their pool, their trampoline, their kayaks, and their sports, they all keep very busy. At the precipice of their yard at the foot of the hillside runs a little stream and together the family built a bridge for it out of scrap wood, introducing the boys to all manner of tools and drills. Violette loves to mountain bike, and the Catamount Trail picks up right at the end of her dirt road. During the worst of the pandemic, she took a lot of bike rides and walks in the woods with the dog, and sometimes the family would join and they’d all have a picnic at the lake.

Violette turned to her land, a regular source of inspiration and solace for her that took on an even greater importance these past 18 months. Her charming glass sculptures have long had as their muse the vegetables and perennials harvested from her garden. During the pandemic, she took the time to revamp this garden, adding three large, raised beds and sculpting two wooden obelisks for plants to climb. In a quiet little corner of the yard, where the boys would sometimes join to help, she escaped the uncertainty and chaos of spring 2020. When a year went by and a new spring arrived, it brought with it the rewards of having cleared the land and planted new seeds, and Violette was filled with appreciation for the marking of time and the beauty of nature. There is a symbiotic relationship between Violette’s life and work, her lively personality and attraction to the land made tangible in her unfussy but elegantly executed work in glass.

Violette rents glassblowing space from her friend Bob Dane in western Massachusetts, a short drive from her home in southern Vermont. She creates the glass elements of her sumptuous and earthy sculptures there, sometimes working with an assistant on larger pieces but making most of the components herself. All the metal and woodworking are done in her home studio. She apprenticed with Dane for a year, studied with Lino Tagliapietra at Pilchuck and Haystack in the 1990s, and had Dante Marioni as an early teacher. To this day, she is inspired by watching them work, by their habits, how they work with the glass, how they push the limits of the material. She was very fortunate to also have had many other well-known glass mentors, including Pino Signoretto, William Morris, Martin Janecky, Karen Willenbrink-Johnsen, and Dick Marquis. When the pandemic first hit, she was thankful for Dane’s safe space to go and continue to blow glass, but by early April the shop shut down and did not fire up again until the fall. Because Violette’s process is relatively solitary for a glass artist, and because she had a stock of pre-made glass fruits and vegetables, she was able for a time to continue to produce work.

As an artist, Violette looked at the world around her—the depressing news, the global health crisis, and the financial toll of it all—and thought about ways her work could help people weather the storm. She made some happy items—potted cacti, sprouts, and aloe—in the hopes of bringing joy to people. Her work combines playful and colorful exuberance with the reassuring comfort of the organic. Her petite plants are cheery green sprouts emerging from smooth ebony pots, and they are a perfect little antidote to set on a windowsill and capture the light. When she was able to blow glass again last fall and winter, she created a series of imaginary summer houses, balancing geometric little dwellings and stylized trees on pillowy bubbles of grass. For those of us who don’t live in the foothills of the Green Mountains, or otherwise have a peaceful little oasis to which we can escape, Violette’s lighthearted and bright landscapes are a fine substitute.

In the years leading up to 2020, Violette had been busy traveling for conferences, and was a guest artist and teacher at Corning. In 2018, in their large amphitheater and with the rare advantage of assistants with extra hands, Violette built a giant potted cactus which she thinks inspired the smaller versions she made during the pandemic. In 2019, she was guest artist at SOFA Chicago and used the Corning Museum’s portable glass studio to blow a potted aloe plant. Working with the large Corning team gave her the opportunity to indulge in her dreams of scaling up, testing the bounds of her aesthetic. But in general, Violette thrives on both the physical and mental challenge of working alone. While she misses the travel and camaraderie that come along with being a glass artist (highlighted in events such as the summer demonstrations at Schantz Galleries), she knows these occasions will return in time.

One of the Awakening series by Jen Violette, purchased by the Sandwich Museum.

In the meantime, Violette is back in the glassblowing studio working on, among other things, an aptly titled series called Awakening. In these works, the onyx-black glass of her small potted plants is formed into smooth rock-like formations, which give life to jaunty green shoots. This past summer, she exhibited one of these works in an exhibition at the Sandwich Museum entitled In Her Voice: Influential Women in Glass. The piece was subsequently purchased by the museum. She has been busy with several private commissions, just finished several wall sculptures for Schantz Galleries, recently participated in Glass-tastic at the Brattleboro Art Museum, and is still harvesting carrots and kale from this year’s garden, which you never know might be the inspiration for her next work of art.

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Available Works by the Artist…

Nest Eggs, 2023

Elements from the Forest Floor

Elements from the Forest Floor, (detail)

Spring Renewal

Summer House with Arborvitae, 2023

5.25 x 5.5 x 5.5”

Drift, 2023

4.75 x 5.5 x 5.5”, Blown glass with cast, patinaed bronze

About the Artist…

Jen Violette's passion for creating art began in early childhood. She learned basic drawing and woodworking skills from her father & sewing skills from her mother. Her paternal grandparents earned their living as studio artists at their home in Maine, and she was always inspired by their work and lifestyle. After graduating from high school in 1990, she decided to study art at Alfred University and received her BFA with honors from Alfred in 1994. She has studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Pilchuck Glass School, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, The Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass and Penland School of Crafts. Her teachers include Lino Tagliapietra, William Morris, Dante Marioni, Richard Marquis, Pino Signoretto, Randy Walker and Karen Willenbrink-Johnsen.

Jen and her husband John Gerding live on a small farm in Wilmington, Vermont with their two young sons. Living in an old farmhouse with connected barns for her studio greatly inspires her daily thoughts and sketches. Jen is an avid gardener and draws great inspiration for her pieces from her vegetable & perennial gardens on their land.

Jen has won numerous awards for her glass and exhibits, and her unique mixed-media sculptures in many fine art galleries nationwide. Her work is included in numerous private collections throughout the world. 

STUDIO FOCUS | DAN DAILEY

Jumpstart the Imagination…

Perspective, 2011,
Individual series
Blown glass, sandblasted and acid polished, anodized iron, 13 3/4 x 22 x 14” photo: Bill Truslow

Dan Dailey never suffers from a shortage of ideas. His sketchbook is full of them and he’ll never get to all of them, even after 50 years making art. Often it begins with a word. The word could be “dubious” or “soft,” “perspective” or “chill”. The word triggers an image. Dailey is an object maker, intrigued and inspired by how an object can be a physical manifestation of a concept. The English language has roughly 1,000,000 words in it. That’s a lot of potential ideas.

His penchant for working in series—Circus Vases, Abstract Heads, Individuals, and Animal Vases, just to name a few—stems from a restlessness to focus on and develop all the various ideas in his head. When he brings an idea to life, he does so with purpose and empathy, communicating an often quite specific feeling or thought. He is less motivated by technique—by pushing the glass to its physical limits—than some of his colleagues. For Dailey, fine craftsmanship is for lending credibility to the object. He is not motivated by making a thing of beauty, although he achieves an undeniable elegance anyway. For Dailey, form is a vehicle for narrative. He knows this approach makes him unique among glass artists, and as he has gotten older, he has gained greater perspective and gratitude for the fact that people seem to like it. 

Covid provided a rare period of reflection on his career that Dailey’s busy schedule never allowed. He has not been on a plane since February 2020, but before that he traveled back and forth to Seattle three or four times a year and regularly worked in Italy and France. Halted work and travel meant more time to meditate on the past. Add to that, the Columbus Museum has been organizing a traveling retrospective on his work for the past six years that should come to fruition soon, forcing him into a literal and figurative opening of the archive. The curator, Annegreth Nill, came for two one-week visits, and they got all kinds of work out of storage. About 60 percent of the exhibition will come from Dailey’s personal collection (of the approximately 3000 pieces he has made throughout his career, he only retained about 300); the rest will come from private lenders and museums. One piece she chose was an unfinished large circus piece, so some of the Covid lockdown has been dedicated to building its bronze and brass components and casting its patte de verre elements.

A short video about Dan’s design process.

Dailey’s attachment to his earliest work (like from when he was a student) is mostly sentimental, and he values it more for the experience of making it and how that experience developed his art than for its aesthetics. But ever since he established himself as an artist, he has been dedicated to doing things well and making work with lasting quality. He is not fooled by the hierarchy of the new—even though he loves to explore new territories and messages. As this collection at Schantz demonstrates, with work going back to the 1990s, Dailey’s craftsmanship and artistry has been considerable and consistent.

Cupids, 2017. Glass cane, anodized aluminum, 37 x 48 x 2”

When the pandemic hit, Dailey made the necessary adjustments to his staff and his working methods to protect everyone’s health and safety. Many of his assistants, like his metalsmith, Dana, and his son, Owen, who does all the glass casting, have their own studios. There was an initial sense of disorientation when everyone retreated to their own spaces, but eventually they learned to use this to their advantage and work was able to continue. Right now, he is working on a pair of sconces of two beret-wearing artists for a client in Chicago who loves photography, and with whom Dailey had numerous conversations about Cartier Bresson. He is also working on a cane mural commission that will eventually go to Florida, an interesting graphic exercise in linear abstraction. In years past, Dailey would go to Seattle to blow glass, working at Ben Moore’s studio with Dante Marioni and Richard Royal, but since Moore passed away in the summer of 2021 the studio has been closed, and for various reasons Dailey hasn’t felt ready to either travel or start up a new series of work just yet.

Likewise, 2013. Vitrolite, nickel and gold plated brass, anodized aluminum, various glass details, enamel paint, 31 x 44 x 6”

During the forced restrictions, Dailey learned to slow down a little, rethink the way he approaches the production of his pieces, and indulge in some other passions. One of those passions is cars, which Dailey values as a ubiquitous part of American culture. Recently, he was invited to exhibit automobile art at a car show in Las Vegas, and even though he has done glass vases and Vitrolite murals dedicated to the subject he is taking a new tack by working some Andy Warhol-style silkscreens. Dailey’s studies of cars—both in glass and in print—are less about the cars themselves and more character explorations of the drivers. Dailey is fascinated by what he calls “the automobile ego,” especially prevalent in LA where people are defined by their cars. That said, he loves to buy cars in LA because they are usually well-kept machines with low mileage whose owners keep them briefly then sell them for the next big thing. Over the years you might have seen Dailey driving one of his Saabs, his 1980s Mercedes, or his prized ’55 Thunderbird.

If driving is a big part of Dailey’s life (he has kept his Covid travels to within several hundred, drivable miles of his New England home), reading has also always been a valuable diversion. Dailey wakes up around 5:30 in the morning and reads periodicals (by 6:30 he is exercising and by 8:30 he is in the studio). He has subscribed to The New York Review of Books for 30 years. He used to look forward to his six-hour flights across the country or over the ocean, with no obligations or interruptions, in which he could lose himself entirely in a book. These days, finding an hour or two in a chair just reading for pleasure is a challenge, with his many studio projects and the ongoing maintenance of his large, old property. But his recent accomplishments include Hell’s Angels by Hunter Thompson, The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel, American Nations by Colin Woodard, Tom and Jack by Henry Adams, A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich, and Five Points by Tyler Abinder. He’s still working on When Christians Were Jews by Paula Fredrikson and American Nations by Jill Lapore, which like textbooks he can put down and pick up and still easily get back into the flow.

For an artist for whom words, ideas, and questions of the human condition are constant fodder for creativity, it is no surprise that books play such an important role in Dailey’s life. It makes sense that he would immerse himself in them at the start of each day, like a jumpstart for his imagination. With the constant inspiration of new literature, his bottomless sketchbook of ideas to tap, and that lengthy list of words still left in the dictionary, Dailey is not done with his character explorations. Whether in the glass forms he is known for or in some new, as yet unleashed iteration, Dailey will no doubt continue to contribute his unique point of view to the world we all inhabit.

Dailey’s show quality 1955 Ford T-bird

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Available Works by the Artist…

Eye to Eye 2015

Blown glass, sandblasted and acid polished 15.5 x 11.5 x 11.5". Currently on exhibit at Schantz Galleries.

Furnace, 2017

Glass cane, anodized aluminum, 17.5 x 25 x 1.5". Currently on exhibit at Schantz Galleries.

Dubious, 2011

Blown glass, sandblasted and acid polished. Anodized aluminum, 23 1/2 x 14 1/4 x 7 1/4”

Shook, 2008

Blown glass, sandblasted and acid polished. Anodized aluminum, 26 x 12 x 8”

Soft, 2007

Blown glass, sandblasted and acid polished. Anodized aluminum, 23 x 11 x 7"

Perspective, 2011

Blown glass, sandblasted and acid polished. Anodized aluminum, 13¾ x 22 x 14”

Cupids, 2017

Glass cane, anodized aluminum, 37 x 48 x 2”

Likewise, 2013

Vitrolite, nickel and gold plated brass, anodized aluminum, various glass details, enamel paint, 31 x 44 x 6”

Chill, 1990

Blown, sandblasted and acid polished glass, Dan Dailey Abstract Head Series, 16.5 x 11 x 11”

Artist, 1992

Blown, sandblasted and acid polished glass vase. Glass details, 18 x 12 x 5”

Sour, 1994

Blown, sandblasted and acid polished glass vase. Green rim. Glass details, 21 x 11”

Spin, 1990

Blown, sandblasted and acid polished amethyst fade to clear glass vase. Lapis and turquoise rim and wraps. Clear glass details, 21 3/4 x 11 x 11”

Red Grass Man, 2994

Blown, sandblasted and acid polished roseorange glass. Orange rim and balls. Multicolored vitreous enamel, 11 x 8 x 8”

Three Man Woman, 1994

Blown, sandblasted and acid polished red-amethyst glass. Blue and black streaked rim and balls. Multicolored vitreous enamel, 9 1/2 x 10”

Pine Tree Man, 1994

Blown, sandblasted and acid polished olive glass. Lapis rim and prunts. Multicolored vitreous enamel, 11.5 x 7.5 x 7.5”

Dynamite Man, 1997

Blown, sandblasted and acid polished red-coral glass. Lapis rim and prunts. Multi-colored vitreous enamel, 5 1/2 x 7 1/4”

Viva, 2005

Ink on paper, 17 x 21”

About the Artist…

Since 1971, Dailey has participated in over 300 group, juried, and invitational exhibitions, and has had numerous one-person museum and gallery exhibits including a major retrospective at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, and a recent installation at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. He has completed more than 70 architectural commissions for corporate headquarters, hospitals, municipalities, a county courthouse, a performing arts center, and private residences. His work is represented in more than 50 museum and public collections around the world.  

STUDIO FOCUS | BERNIE D'ONOFRIO

Living in the Moment…

Until he retired from teaching 3 years ago, Bernie D’Onofrio had worked nearly every day of his life, both as a part-time instructor and glass studio manager at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt), and as an artist pursuing his own creative vision. He never considered it work and felt lucky to have his passion be his profession. That passion only grew stronger as the years progressed, and D’Onofrio was nourished by the people he worked with and the students he taught. The good fortune of loving what you do is not without its pressures, however; his quiet fear that it would all come to end pushed him to work harder and harder, and his personal ambitions meant hectic weeks in non-stop motion. He remembers the first day after he stopped teaching being as awkward as the first day of junior high school, filled with uneasiness and insecurity.

The Artist in Glass: Revealing the Soul in Sand

A video made by D’Onofrio’s students at MassArt.

D’Onofrio’s career as a professional artist was there like a trusted friend, giving him continued purpose. He has a coldshop and studio at his home in Millis, MA and regularly took the hour-long drive back to MassArt in Boston to work in their hotshop. When the pandemic hit, and MassArt decided to close the campus to everyone except fulltime students, D’Onofrio’s creative outlet—in a moment he likens to “cutting off his hands”—was suddenly and completely gone. The loss of his studio hit hard, as it was for as long as he can remember a place of great inspiration, personal challenge, and fulfilling relationships.

Despite his ambition and work ethic, or maybe because of it, D’Onofrio has spent many years cultivating his definition of success. He has come to understand that for him success means doing as much as he possibly can each day and not regretting what could not get done; it means living in the moment and not worrying too much about tomorrow. This outlook on life offered D’Onofrio a considerable pandemic silver lining—the opportunity and energy for meaningful engagement with his close friends and family, particularly with his wife, Brenda, with whom he could finally do the simple things that in 40 years together their busy lives had rarely allowed.

Brenda and Bernie D’Onofrio

Visiting with mom!

The pair met in grad school and Brenda has also spent her life in creative pursuits, running art programs at the women’s prison in Framingham and a now-closed mental health hospital in Medfield. For the past 18 months, they hunkered down in their outpost in remote and rural Millis (a town with about 7,000 residents) and enjoyed life’s basic pleasures—fresh air every day, taking walks even in the harshest winter weather, going to the store, sitting in the park. He realized he was just fine if the biggest decision he made in a day was what size coffee to order. He celebrated his 70th birthday and visited with his mother in Medford, MA, who just turned 96 and still lives in the house he grew up in. He was able to consider his life outside the single dimension of glass.

With Brenda on the Slough Creek View Hiking Trail, Yellowstone National Park

Bernie and Brenda still have some things they want to do before he dives back into his work, such as a trip to Montana, where the two love to backpack and go fly fishing. But the siren song of glass will eventually call D’Onofrio back into the studio. Right now, he keeps track of his creative noodling with doodles and sketches that are less precursors to specific work than they are avenues for figuring things out. D’Onofrio’s approach to his work is in fact quite methodical and scientific as he experiments with different forms and colors in a practice of problem-solving that over the course of many years has led to an intuitive relationship with the medium. Each piece leads him to something else, and D’Onofrio gets a lot of satisfaction and inspiration out of the fluid trajectory from one work to the next.

D’Onofrio’s father was a painter and technical illustrator, but he resisted being taught by dad and was more drawn to tactile glass than paint and canvas. He is fascinated by the alchemy of glass as a simple mixture of raw materials thrown into a 2000-degree furnace, and by the immediacy of glass as it is manipulated it into a voluminous object of color, space, texture, line, and light not bound by the restrictions of a two-dimensional plane. Later in life, he came to understand the powerful influence of his father’s tutelage when he appropriated the still life format in his desert series installations of opaque anthropomorphic vessels.

D’Onofrio’s work is a balance between commitment to craftsmanship and a call to contribute something of his humanity to the world around him. He puts forward his spirit, his beliefs, and his outlook on the world in his artwork, and over the course of his career his aesthetic has pivoted dramatically to reflect changing circumstances. About ten years ago, he had a strong reaction to the proliferation of the digital in our lives, lamenting how our device dependency fundamentally affected our interactions with others and contributed to a loss of personal connection. His work became less narrative and more representative of an inner landscape seeking expression, which he visualized in a completely different way than his previous work. Whereas his desert landscapes were opaque, these new pieces optimized the transparency and optics of glass to allow the viewer to search the pieces and discover the world within.

While he has not closed the book on this chapter of introversion, he also knows that the pandemic will stir yet another rebirth in the direction of his work. D’Onofrio is not one to hold on to negative waves, and rather looks forward to capturing what he anticipates will be humanity’s heightened exuberance in a post-pandemic world. He envisions a course correction where our engagement with one another will become more human, and he is compelled to incorporate that into work that will make people happy. If success for D’Onofrio is living in the moment and expressing that moment in his work, it is also in knowing that the objects he makes have a life beyond his own hand, that eventually they will be absorbed and appreciated by those around him who share precious space in this extraordinary world.

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About the Artist

Bernie D’onofrio has work in many museum collections, including; Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; Modern International Glaskunst, Ebelto£t, Denmark; Kawasaki Dai Shi, Kawasaki, Japan; Milwaukee Art Museum. Milwaukee, WI; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL; Koganesaki Glass Museum, Ugusu, Japan; Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, WA; Michner Museum, Kent State University, Kent, OH; Headley Whitney Museum, Lexington, Kentucky; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian, Wash, DC; Mobile Art Museum, Mobile, AL.

STUDIO FOCUS | DOROTHY HAFNER

Dorothy Hafner began the pandemic lockdown quite differently than most—she got on a plane. She was thrilled to be part of a group exhibition in Florida in early March 2020 and despite a feeling that things were not business-as-usual, she traveled to St. Petersburg for the opening events. Between the flight landing and the opening of the exhibition, the gallery made the difficult decision to shut down. By the time she returned to Connecticut, the world had changed.

Hafner is a self-described “news junkie” who reads The New York Times front to back, a habit which usually fulfills her but during the pandemic was depleting. One look at Hafner’s artwork and you know she comes from a place of joy. When she feels down, Hafner is more apt to watch a tear-jerker movie than work her emotions out in the studio. She has been a full-time, self-supporting artist for 40 years and in that time has always aimed to bring delight into people’s lives through her work. Nothing gives her greater pleasure than seeing someone smile when they look at one of her pieces.

Keenly aware that she cannot create happy work from an unhappy place, Hafner avoided her studio in the early days of the pandemic. Throughout her career she has allowed herself pauses when she feels the need for change or when she is in search of her next idea, so a short break felt normal. When she eventually forced herself back in the studio, she was using such dreary colors that her assistant (who came to work masked and gloved) remarked that the pieces looked like they were made by someone else. So instead of pressuring herself to create her next masterworks, she allowed herself to play by making happy objects for her friends and relatives. Using precut and fired glass pieces in her workshop, she made plates and platters (forms she had not done since the 1980s), using a light and intuitive approach that was all about bringing joy and optimism in a difficult time.

Hafner’s Studio in Connecticut
Photos by Paul Rogers

Hafner spent 40 years living and working in Manhattan, returning to her girlhood home in Connecticut during the scorching urban summers to help in her parents’ garden and swim in their pool. She loved the plurality of city, its people and food, and the years were extremely busy. Her avant-garde tableware for Tiffany and Rosenthal became icons of 1980s design. She traveled extensively, commuting to the Rosenthal factory in Germany and flying on their behalf for appearances throughout Europe, Asia, and Australia. All that time in the air gave her an appreciation for the vast topographies of the earth, images she recorded in her brain like photographs on a camera reel and which she recalls to this day when making her glass panels.

Hafner is a trained painter and sculptor who relished in the fantastic opportunities that accompanied being an industrial designer, but after a decade she needed a respite and a new direction. While scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, she was overwhelmed by its breathtaking colors and forms and the brilliant dynamism of its living ecosystem. When she tried to paint her memories, she found the paint lacked the nuance of the images in her head. She began the search for a medium equal to the challenge and signed up for a workshop at Urban Glass in Brooklyn, where for $60 she learned to blow a paperweight. What struck her most was how, at every table, each young artist was working in a unique way with glass. This creative experimentation, in which each piece was its own journey, felt very different from her experience in commercial production and conjured feelings from her early days as an artist that she was anxious to recapture.

Her foray into glass felt as serendipitous as her path to ceramics (Hafner began designing dinnerware after the ceramicists in her shared studio space kept getting her painting materials dirty with their clay and glazes). Once she decided to pursue glass, she immersed herself fully in the medium. As she got further along in her work, she learned of Maestro Lino Tagliapietra and was fortunate to be introduced to him by mutual friends, beginning a period of collaboration between the two. The idea of layering fused flat glass panels to blend color and create depth came accidentally when Hafner was stacking items for storage and temporarily put them on a light table, where they came alive before her eyes. It was an a-ha moment. The technique is ideally suited to Hafner, who loves the extensive planning and drawing process that precedes the making of a single panel (think 20-30 drawings for each possible idea). When she is in her design studio, it is a white void of blank walls providing a monastic environment for unadulterated creativity.

Hafner pre-designs her panels using colored pencils keyed to match the glass in an analogue mapping of layered tracing paper on a light table. She uses a material called fusible glass, which can be melted multiple times without burnouts of the color, and though the blues, greens, yellows, and browns arrive in their final color and the color remains consistent throughout many firings, many of the colors she uses (such as the reds, pinks, oranges, and purples) arrive in her studio as clear glass and only turn color in a first, tightly calibrated melt. She makes maquettes to anticipate what will happen to the layered colors once fired, and the execution of the final piece is a laborious process of cutting and tightly fitting small elements in a multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. She conceives of many pieces, but a precious few make it past the arduous planning stages. Hafner’s work may look casual and make people feel happy, but each is a technical marvel that is extremely time-consuming to create.

Just as Hafner’s ceramic work embodied the abstract linearity of the city, her glass panels reflect the organic environment of her current life. Since moving in 2010 to a country house on a woodland property in Connecticut, she has lived in the pure luxury of a yard, singing birds, and a porch where she can watch the sunset every night. She commemorates this wonder in her work through pastiches of color that evoke the magnificent sights and sounds of her past and present experiences. Magic Hour is a compilation of landscapes (blooming tulip fields in Holland, rolling hills, reflective water, and brilliant skies) expressing that moment that photographers wait for all day, when the light is just right. Raspberry Patch was inspired by Japanese pachinko parlors, but also by woven textiles, and the colors of the berry patches in her parents’ garden—all melded together in one seamlessly beautiful expression. Besides landscape is the influence of music, as in Tango Solo, which articulates in glass the polyrhythmic complexity of a dance (which Hafner has studied) in which the partner’s movements do not mirror but arc and swish in and out of each other.

Works like Magic Hour and Tango Solo (above), have been in Hafner’s private collection for many years. She was simply not ready to let them go. Just as some folks cleaned out their closets during the pandemic, she went through her collection of work and realized it was time to release them out in the world so that they might find new homes. She plans to work again, but right now she is focused on the Hafner Creative Space, which she launched in Norwalk as a casual place where people can have the opportunity to work with glass, access their own creative instincts, and make beautiful things. It’s a bit of a nod to Urban Glass, where she first made that $60 paperweight many years ago, and very in keeping with Hafner herself, who has pivoted many times throughout her career to keep herself inspired, fresh, and filled with joy.

An installation by Hafner at the lobby of Frisbie Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NH

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New Form

Available Works by the Artist

Waves, 2016

11 x 9.5 x 3.5"

Spring Flourish,

Multi-layered fused glass, stainless steel, 11 1/8 x 9 3/4 x 3 1/2” each, (8 x 8 x 3/4” glass only)

Sky Rider, 2016

Multi-layered fused glass panel, stainless steel pedestal, 11 x 9.75 x 3.5” ( 8 x 8 x.75” glass only)

Summer Leaves, 2016

Multi-layered fused glass panel, stainless steel pedestal, 11 x 9.75 x 3.5” ( 8 x 8 x 3.25” glass only)

Raspberry Patch Variation, 2007

Multi-layered fused glass panel, stainless steel pedestal, 24 x 14 x 6”

Silk Road, 2009

Multi-layered fused glass panel, stainless steel pedestal, 23 x 14 x 6”

Magic Hour, 2015

multi-layered, fused glass panel, stainless steel pedestal, 24 x 14 x 6" (17 x 10 x 5/8" glass only)

About the Artist

As Hafner’s flat glass mosaics evolved they began to acquire a unique beauty of their own, apart from the vessel onto which they were rolled.

In 1997, Hafner shifted her focus solely to the flat glass, as painter to canvas. Building layer upon layer of transparent cutouts, she began fusing them together to produce single multi-layered transparent panels, each rich with overlays of her diaphanous imagery.

Hafner’s glass works are in many major collections, including the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, NYC, the Brooklyn Museum, NY, the Musee des Arts Decoritifs, Montreal, the Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, the American Crafts Museum, NY, and the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach.

STUDIO FOCUS | WINNIE TESCHMACHER

Keep seeing anew…

The idea that time is an arbitrary measure of existence has rarely been as noticeable as it was during the pandemic, when for many of us the regular cadence by which we calibrate our days was interrupted. For glass artist Winnie Teschmacher, the intriguing phenomenon of time has always been forefront in her mind. She has written about “how time, at times, appears to fly by, or instead seems to crawl by excruciatingly slowly. The perception defines the experience.” Teschmacher thinks of the many poets who have written about time, such as James Brockway who wrote:

 Time is a feeling in the air
Time's not really there
But man, as history shows
Lives by illusion. Time comes and goes.

For Teschmacher, the pandemic brought stretches of downtime that she would ordinarily have filled with her work. She lives in a 500-year-old farmhouse in rural Holland (which she describes as “very Dutch”), whose attic is an exhibition space and whose 100-year-old barn (which she calls “the young part” of the property) she transformed into a studio over 30 years ago. Its remote location made it a safe and peaceful place to be during lockdowns and in the face of public health risks, but working was a challenge. When in the studio doing her own work, she works with optical glass which largely comes from the Czech Republic and which has recently been challenging to obtain.

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A tour through the renovated 500 year old building where Teschmacher creates her work.

Teschmacher’s journey as a glass artist began 40 years ago as a lampglass blower, after which she did studio glass blowing and traveled to Pilchuck and other studios in the States. About 34 years ago she was working behind the Communist wall in what was then Czechoslovakia with Jan Frydrych, who is an optical glass master and whom she lovingly refers to as her “Czech brother.” She learned a great deal from Frydrych, who helped her build the workshop in her barn and with whom she continues to work on her sculptures. For a time, she combined both hot and cold glass in her work, but about 15 years ago she moved exclusively to cold glass.

 Many of her sculptures take hundreds of hours to complete and require the assistance of colleagues with enough skill, knowledge, and technical expertise to execute her very precise vision. They are also heavy and take some muscle to maneuver, so Frydrych (and now his son) have been invaluable to Teschmacher. But travel between the Czech Republic and Holland has been almost entirely shut down for the past eighteen months, and except for a brief opening in the summer that allowed her to drive to the Czech Republic (a long trip she often fills with audio books), they have been unable to work together. It forced them to sit with the time, to just wait.

Teschmacher is also the founder and artistic director of De Ketelfactory, an exhibition space in Schiedam whose mission is to “focus on the artist’s entire approach rather than on individual works; on movement, encounter and especially depth rather than a static exhibition.” Though the exhibition space remains closed to visitors, Teschmacher used the quiet days early in the pandemic to conceive of a project in which 50 of the gallery’s artists were each given the task of making a 24-page “cahier,” or notebook, documenting the unique way they approached the experience of living in Spring 2020. She then collated the 50 cahiers into a beautiful volume of individual perspectives, some that were purely visual and others which contained text.

Teschmacher’s contribution to the project took her back into her three trips to Japan, the most recent of which was in autumn 2019. Through her photographs, she was transported not into her memories but into a deep and fresh look at the beauty and inspiration that she encountered there. Her affinity for Japan is physical—she has a visceral relationship to its architecture, gardens, art, and landscapes—but it is also spiritual because Japan is, as she phrased it in her cahier, “the epitome of emptiness.” There, space is made for nothingness and then time is given to fill that space with focus, meditation, and silence. In her cahier she quotes the Japanese author Musashi, who advised to: “Polish the two-fold spirit: heart and mind, and sharpen the two-fold gaze: perception and sight. When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void.”

Teschmacher’s pristine and clean sculptures are reminiscent of stone sculptures by Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi, and within them is a complexity that reads as simplicity. The spheres, discs, and cones she creates seem to just appear—almost as if they were made without hands—like sacred relics for meditation. Her goal is to create something that is almost nothing but contains the energy of the universe. Therefore, everything about each work must be exact, from the color and clarity of the glass to the proportions of the form. Though envisioned on a much smaller scale, many of her sculptures have the magnitude of religious architecture and seem to vibrate with a spiritual energy source. They thrive in quiet spaces, where they have the room to breathe, where their light-filled and colored shadows have undisturbed surfaces on which to move throughout the day, and where viewers have the physical and psychic space to commune with them.

Focus 2, 2019, 7.9 x 7.9 x 13.4”

While Teschmacher listens to music while she is sawing the glass, most of her work (such as the cutting and polishing) is done in silence and is an act of meditation as she becomes one with the piece. It is an interesting career choice for a self-described “impatient” person, who is humbled and slowed by a material as challenging as glass. In fact, she began her working life as a physical fitness instructor at university before her passion for glassblowing took over. She is also an avid reader, surrounded in her home by hundreds of books that range from esoteric philosophical tomes to art books and Japanese literature (Haruki Murakami is a particular favorite). Her large farmhouse contains one room called an opkamer (it was traditionally the nicest room in the house, located above the cellar where things could be kept cold, decorated with special floor and ceiling paintings, and used as a presentation room for the farmer). Today, when she takes the time to sit quietly in there, she experiences an energy in the room that silently connects her to another dimension.

It is hard to believe that so much time has passed since the onset of the pandemic, and now as things in Holland slowly begin to open and Teschmacher begins to think about returning to the enterprises and actions that have historically given structure to her days, she is reminded again about the illusoriness of time and the importance of living in the present. As she says: “Everything changes and moves. The point is to keep seeing anew. The environment, art, ourselves. The only way to keep moving is to see anew.”

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New Form

Available Work by the Artist

Reflection in White, 2020

Optical cut and polished glass; yellow: 7.3 x 5.1 x 5.1”, white: 7.3 x 7.3 x 10.2”

Touching the Void 4, 2020

Optical cut and polished glass, 6.7 x 6.7 x 9.5” each

Sunyata 2, 2020

Optical cut and polished glass, 11.4 x 11.4 x 8.6”

Focus 2, 2019

Optical cut and polished glass, 7.9 x 7.9 x 13.4”

The Eye Inside, 2013

Optical cut and polished glass, 6 x 12 x 12"

Purple Flame, 2013

Optical cut and polished glass, 9.9 x 9 x 9”

Purification, 2007

Gold yellow casting glass, cut and polished, 12 x 9 x 9"

Trailokya, 2016

Optical cut and polished glass, 11 x 6 x 6"

Universe, 2007

Casting glass, cut and polished, 8 x 12 x 12”

About the Artist

From 1982-1984,Winnie Teschmacher studied at Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam, Sculpture. In 1983, she owned a glass studio in The Hague. From 1989-1993, she was a Freelance designer Unica, Royal Leerdam glassworks. From 1989-present, she is working for glass artists in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In 199, she had a scholarship to the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, Washington.

STUDIO FOCUS | DANTE MARIONI

The rhythm of creating work…

Dante Marioni has lived and worked in the same studio building in Seattle for 41 years. The studio is located on the first floor, which makes it convenient for getting the motorcycles and mountain bikes he stores there in and out for rides. These pieces of machinery are beautiful, but their imposing metal presence in the middle of the studio makes for quite a contrast to Dante’s own elegant glass forms, produced over the past few decades and gracefully lining the walls. In this same space, there is an area for Dante to pull cane, although sometimes because the cane can get quite long, this happens in the hallway or, when the weather permits, out in the driveway. In the studio, he also cuts the pieces and assembles the patterns that will eventually get applied to the glass and blown into vessels.

Across the hallway from his studio is the hotshop he shares with fellow glass artist Janusz Pozniak, who has worked with Dante for 30 years and who also has his own distinct career. The hotshop was originally put together in 1984 by Mark Ekstrand and Dante’s father, Paul Marioni, and Dante took it over in 1990. When Dante is blowing glass, Janusz is by his side and when Dante is not in the hotshop, Janusz uses it for his own work. When the pandemic hit last year, Dante was just wrapping up some collaborative work with John Kiley (work that was exhibited in 2020 at Schantz Galleries) at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, which shut down as soon as Dante and John were done working. Word was getting around that all the hotshops were making the same call to close. Dante figured he would have to follow suit, but Janusz (who also resides in the building) suggested they keep the furnace burning. Since they were essentially quarantined together and comfortable wearing masks around one another, they were able to keep at their work.

As pandemic stories go Dante’s is unusual in that, creatively, he was able to fundamentally continue doing what he normally does. His other assistant, a local Seattle guy named Mikey Cozza, chose to hunker down in the uncertain early days of 2020 and temporarily left the glassmaking team incomplete, but before long he returned to work. During this brief period when they could not blow glass, Dante spent a lot of time in the studio thinking about what he wanted to make (doing a form of inner research) and stockpiling patterns. The momentary isolation and pause enabled him to really focus on his vision, advancing the trajectory of his latest series of works, pieces he calls Print and Maze.

When Mikey came back to the studio and Dante’s team was reassembled, the rhythm of creating work resumed in earnest. Most days of the week are devoted to what Dante calls “the fussy stuff”—cane pulling and pattern making. It can take an entire day to chop the pieces of cane and arrange them for a Maze piece, and the rondels that go into the Print vessels are also time-consuming. In both cases, Dante envisions the final vessel as a canvas on which the pattern will lay, and the most exciting challenge for him with these works is predicting how a pattern will turn out when it is finally blown.

Dante explaining his technique to our group on the Schantz Galleries Studio Tour of his studio in 2019.

On Wednesdays, they go into the hotshop and blow the vessels. Each week, the goal is to finish five objects. Dante rigorously self-edits, only keeping finished objects that meet his exacting set of standards. This laid back, native Californian may love adventure and the outdoors, but little gets left to chance in his work. Dante notes that their weekly success rate for acceptable final products lands somewhere between 0 and 5 and it has been a while since they scored a 5. Seconds are often given to Dick Weiss, a stained-glass artist who flattens them and uses them in his large-scale installations.

The works that do pass muster are fresh and flawlessly executed. The patterns on one side of the transparent glass interplay seductively with the patterns on the other side of the glass, which bend gracefully as light refracts through the surface of the material. The resultant and exquisite optical moiré effect is a departure from the opaque vases which characterized Dante’s early work. Those early pieces were all about glassblowing—color was secondary—and Dante talks about how making them made everyone who worked on them better glassmakers. But these latest works are all about pattern, which introduces an entirely different and compelling set of obstacles in the pursuit of excellence.

Ever since a teenaged Dante Marioni met Lino Tagliapietra and started blowing glass, he has been driven in his glass career by a few major motivations: to be really good at what he does; to make really fine work in a way that has not been done before and in a way that only he can; and to contribute to the existing vocabulary of blown glass forms. Dante loves the teamwork aspect of glassblowing, has immense respect for the incredible glass talent concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, and appreciates the amazing work his friends and colleagues are doing in the medium. But in the hotshop, he is uniquely focused and totally in charge of his vision, aiming to make objects that are quintessentially him and not derivative of any of his mentors of friends.

As part of this community of glass, Dante has historically traveled extensively to exhibit, do workshops, teach, and enjoy the local beer. The pandemic brought this to a halt, canceling what would have been a very busy year of trips in 2020 throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. This weekend, he will take his first airplane trip in 15 months, for an event in conjunction with an exhibition in San Francisco. He plans to go to Pilchuck this June for a short session and the trip to Japan has been rescheduled for fall, making Dante feel like life is slowly getting back to normal. Just like every summer, his furnace will get shut down, partly for its annual maintenance, partly because it is simply too hot to blow glass in the summer, and partly because Seattle offers a brief but glorious stretch of weather which begs to be fully enjoyed. It will be fascinating to see what is next, when Dante once again fires up the furnace and gets back to work.

Available Works by Dante Marioni

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New Form

Multigreen Gum Tree Leaf, 2019

43 x 9.5 x 2.5”

Purple Maze, 2018

29.5 x 12.5 x 2.5"

Topaz Maze, 2021

Blown glass, 33 x 15 x 3”

White Reticello Leaf, 2004

Blown glass, 27 x 11 x 7"

Trio of Aqua, Red and Bronze Print

Red Print, 2021

30.75 x 13 x 3"

Aqua Print, 2021

29 x 13 x 3"

Bronze Print, 2022

28 x 13.5 x 3.5"

About the Artist

 Dante Marioni was exposed to and enamored of glassblowing by the age of 15, when he moved with his family to Seattle. The son of pioneering studio glass artist Paul Marioni, Dante Marioni grew up with a family of artists that includes two well-known uncles, painter Joseph Marioni and conceptual artist Tom Marioni. Dante received an intensive early training at Pilchuck School in Stanwood, Washington, working overtime to practice glassblowing. Here, he met Lino Tagliapietra, whom he credits as the greatest living glass artist, and whom he gratefully calls mentor. Marioni is strongly inspired by Benjamin Moore (some of his more monumentally tall and thin vases are created in Moore’s studio) and Richard Marquis (with whom he developed the mosaic technique).

By the late-1980s, Marioni could claim his own successful career, exhibiting in major galleries and museums such as the Bellevue Art Museum, Washington and the American Craft Museum, New York. In 1995, he was invited to the Clinton White House as part of an exhibition, and his work graced the cover of the accompanying publication, The White House Collection of American Crafts. In 2008, he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. His works are part of major collections and museums throughout the world, including: the Corning Museum of Glass (NY); the Chrysler Museum (Norfolk, VA); the New Zealand National Museum of Art (Wellington); the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC); and the Yokohama Museum of Art (Japan).

STUDIO FOCUS | CAPPY THOMPSON

A mindful approach…

When the pandemic first hit and the world shut down, Cappy Thompson was quite busy bringing some big projects to completion. Her work carried on relatively uninterrupted and her personal life remained comparatively safe, but the magnitude of the upheaval around her did not go unnoticed. Witnessing the global health crisis and listening to the protests and conversations on social justice inequities felt like a real moment of reckoning for Thompson, secure as she is in the big and beautiful fourth floor artists co-op in Seattle where she has lived and worked for 32 years. Realizing her privilege made her think deeply about the relevance of what she does, and she is grateful for the opportunity that 2020 gave her to be thoughtful about her life and work.

Cappy Thompson invites us into her studio for a virtual tour.

In the quiet days of last year, she was reminded of how much pleasure she derives from her space, which brims with cheerful and soulful works of art and decorative pieces filled with personal meaning. Sometimes she feels like she is in the company of friends, there is so much life to the objects which she surrounds herself with. She also visits her 97-year-old mother, Virginia, one week each month in her home on Washington’s Key Peninsula, with a beautiful view overlooking the Puget Sound and Mt. Rainier. Thompson truly cherishes these weeks of physical and emotional respite with her mom, an artist who she describes as a kindred spirit.

Above: a studio tour with Cappy Thompson.
Below: The view from Virginia Thompson’s home, on the Key Peninsula in Washington.

When Thompson was in her 20s thinking about what do with her life, she was interested in both psychology and art. It followed, then, that when she started to approach the discipline of art professionally, she saw it as a tool for self-exploration. She has found the journey of self-discovery through art extremely rewarding and is attracted to the idea that she will never come to the bottom of it. For her, art is an intuitive process. She often turns to her collection of second-hand books, leafing through until something pops out as inspiration. She thinks about ideas for a while, sits and sketches in an act of visual journaling until something emerges.

Secret Garden, 2013
Vitreous enamels reverse painted on blown glass, 15.5 x 13 x 5.5”

Moon, 2013
Vitreous enamels reverse painted on blown glass, 16 x 9 x 6.25”

She has written that “as a narrative painter, the issue has always been content. The issue wasn’t glass, the material I chose some 37 years ago. Nor was it the painting technique—grisaille or gray-tonal painting—that I taught myself to use. My work—which spans several decades and a variety of scales from the intimate to the monumental—has always been driven by content.” She reads herself through her work, and it has become more and more important to her over the years to try to express the relationship between her physical and spiritual life, between her inner self and the realm around her. Her exquisitely painted vases and panels appropriate images from art history, myth, fables, global culture, cosmology, nature, and religion to tell very personal stories.

Of Secret Garden, she wrote:

I had a dream years ago where I met a woman in an open-air studio and it was filled with objects and animals of a sacred nature. She invited me in and we talked about art. When I woke, I recognized myself as both the woman and the guest. The animal in the garden is my animal nature, the desire aspect of my being.

And of the piece Moon:

I love images from Arab and Indian painting in which the moon is anthropomorphized, a figure sitting cross-legged gazing down from the heavens. Here I do my own version of her as a beauty, face framed with a lace collar and gown embroidered with the seasons. The reverse side of the vessel pictures the stars of the Pleiades.

Even though content is paramount, Thompson approaches the physical act of painting with dedication. She sees painting as a practice, a muscle she continues to flex even during the pandemic to keep it toned. She has painted on blown glass vessels, done collaborative painted work with glass and ceramics, and for the last few years has painted with transparent enamel colors on mouthblown, sheets of glass (which retain an organic edge).

A mindful approach to life and work is nothing new to Thompson, who has studied different enlightenment philosophies, striven to cultivate a deeper understanding of herself and her surroundings, and sought a balance between her material and spiritual world. In college, she became interested in world religions, looking not just at Christianity but at Sufism, Hinduism, Paganism, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam (she was especially drawn to religious imagery, which she describes as “created before the invention of ‘art’ as we know it—before painters controlled the content of their work. These works were decreed by religious and political authorities to depict the magnificence and beauty of the natural and divine order. What I loved was the naïve naturalism and devout simplicity of that period—like the folk art of any period.”

Thompson studied the work of Armenian philosopher George Gurdjieff (1855-1949), then spent almost a decade studying A.H. Almaas (b. 1944) and his method of self-development which “leads to a deepening realization of the fullness of the human being—a being who experientially embraces and expresses the totality of the cosmos in all its physical and spiritual dimensions.” She then found the work of Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who believed that the spiritual world can be accessible to human understanding. In his book How to Know Higher Worlds (1993), Steiner wrote that:

“It is imperative to extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for the attainment of higher knowledge. It must be clearly realized that a start has to be made with the thoughts and feelings with which we continually live, and that these feelings and thoughts must merely be given a new direction. Everyone must say to himself: ‘In my own world of thought and feeling the deepest mysteries lie hidden, only hitherto I have been unable to perceive them’.”

Though Thompson has only studied Steiner for the past ten years, when she looks back on her work, even back to the 1970s, she sees that these themes were resonant in her even before she could define them.

Thompson is going to be 70 next January, and the last few years have brought some trials, including the loss a few years ago of her beloved husband. But she is filled with gratitude for the fact there is never a dull moment in a life well lived, well examined, and well loved. There is a captivating allure to her paintings on glass, which so honestly and deeply explore her personal dreams and experiences. This is because, along with their jewel-like colors and visually arresting motifs, they illuminate themes of self-discovery, spiritual exploration, and man’s yearning to understand his place in the universe which echo within each of us.

Video: Large Scale Installation at Seattle - Tacoma airport.

Dreaming of Spirit Animals features the work of Pacific Northwest artist, Cappy Thompson and her process of creating a large scale public art piece (the largest painted glass window in existence)for the Sea-Tac airport addition. This excerpt from the documentary explores Thompson’s unique relationship to the function of narrative and autobiography in glass art as well as her interest in dreams and mythology and her methods of incorporating diverse inspirations for her glass work. 2 Minutes

Recent Residential Commissions

Day Garden, Night Garden, and Ocean Garden

Available Works by Cappy Thompson

Click on image to enlarge.

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About the Artist

 “I started by designing and painting glass panels based on the narrative content of mythology, fables and folktales, drawn in oblique projection, with transparent jewel-like colors.  Later I painted similar narratives on glass vessels.

 About fifteen years ago I found myself moving away from mythological narrative and toward compositions on vessels that drew upon images and themes from my personal life.  Elements would drift up and assemble into picture-poems that seemed to have a life of their own.

 I began to understand these works as reflections of the spiritual and psychological issues in my life.  I painted members of my family and myself in a kind of autobiographical fantasy, working with the mythopoetic materials of my life.  I cast myself into scenes from various spiritual traditions.

This began an autobiographical exploration of world culture and spirituality that continues to the present.

I see now, after more than three decades of work, that I am like those medieval painters striving to express magnificence and beauty.  But my expression focuses on the human experience of goodness, of hope and of love.”

STUDIO FOCUS | MARTIN BLANK

… counting one’s blessings

There is an exuberance to Martin Blank that simply cannot be contained, even by a pandemic that has brought us all personal and professional challenges. His positivity is magnetic. His enthusiasm is contagious. He has an insatiable curiosity about the world around him that inspires him to investigate things ranging from the natural world to Euclidean geometry. If you are looking for interesting conversation, he is a sure thing. He also has an incredibly balanced outlook on life, taking the good in stride with the bad and accepting the peaks and valleys of life and art with meditative grace.

Historically, Blank has been a man on the go. For years, he has traveled every two to three months installing his stunning glass sculptures. He loves to travel with his wife Marilyn (they live in Seattle) and two grown sons Isaac and Torin (who reside in New York). Four years ago, the family started a tradition of meeting for two-weeks each Christmas somewhere in the world. The first year it was Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. The next year they went to Italy, celebrating the parents’ 30th anniversary and spending Christmas Eve in Venice. The third year, they visited Thailand where Marilyn lived as a teenager. In 2020, with Covid travel restrictions in place they convened on Orcas Island, Washington where they swam in the frigid winter ocean, cooked meals together, did yoga, took drives, and read books. For Blank, this time with his family was a real gift. He says, it is not enough to count your blessings, you need to find the time and the place to count them.

At top, Blank’s sons Isaac and Torin in Italy. In the middle, a video of the family enjoying Christmas 2020 on Orcas Island. And above, Blank’s Rhodesian Ridgeback Finn resting on the cot in his office.

Blank is a man who keeps things organized and likes to have a plan, but as a glass artist he is no stranger to sitting with uncertainty. He is incredibly social, so narrowing his community during the precarious months of the pandemic felt unnatural. He is keenly aware that his art is not made in a vacuum and grateful to have worked with so many wonderful people over the years, especially a man he calls “the amazing Jon Harvey.” He did have to lay off two employees and only blew glass a few times last year, but he considers himself lucky that his work was not significantly altered by Covid. He continued to work in his 3000 square-foot studio, subletting parts of it to an architect who played by the mask-wearing, social-distancing rules that kept everyone safe and productive. He learned a new pattern and felt at peace with the notion that the intensity of life comes and goes in waves.

Outside of work, he braved the cold and adopted a daily swimming routine at an outdoor pool that opened year-round during the pandemic. He took a lot of walks and found the regular athletic practice very grounding. He has always been an avid reader, a consumer of books, and the pandemic gave him even more time to devote to this passion. He loves science fiction and fantasy, but also physics and chemistry, history, world religions, Gertrude Stein, and the occasional Stephen King. The insightful romantic poet Walt Whitman is a bit of a hero. And during the pandemic he spent hours of quality time with his protective four-year old Rhodesian Ridgeback, Finn, who himself spent a lot of hours asleep on a cot in Blank’s office.

Steam Portrait
99 Church Street, New York

If a River Could Tell a Story
Imagine Museum, St. Petersburg

Professionally, the years leading up to Covid have been extraordinary for Blank. His breathtaking installation Repose in Amber (one of the largest hot-sculpted landscapes in the world) was installed at the Ft. Wayne Museum of Art, his spectacular Current was installed in the lobby of the Tacoma Art Museum, and his evocative outdoor Steam Portrait was installed at 99 Church Street, just steps away from the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York. During the quiet days of the pandemic, he worked on arranging the pieces for a new commission for the Imagine Museum in St. Petersburg, its large-scale forcing him to problem solve and push boundaries. The museum director called upon Blank to create a abstract landscape that referenced Buddha, the Virgin Mary, and Ghandi, as well as more universal figurative forms, all to represent the connection between man, nature, and spirituality and bring the viewer a sense of peace and well-being. The finished sculpture, entitled If a River Could Tell a Story, cascades down a staggering staircase of steel slabs, thousands of pounds of glass floating weightlessly on four legs.

Fluent Steps
Museum of Glass, Tacoma

Blank has been fascinated with the figures since he was 13 and his mom signed him up for an art class at the MFA in Boston. He was frustrated in school by learning disabilities and hampered in sports by poor stereoscopic vision in one eye. But he loved to draw and was especially beguiled by the Greek and Roman statues in the museum and how they epitomized beauty. He still paints and draws to this day, talking about the eye-mind-hand connection it engenders. When he is really in the moment, when he lets go of judgement and intellectualization and just purely responds to what he sees, he can let go even of the mind and create a direct line between his eye and his hand. It is a very pure experience with the material. He went to RISD, started blowing glass with Dale Chihuly and Lino Tagliapietra, and before long realized he had a real gift for sculpting glass.

Glass is the only material that is worked between the phases of matter—liquid and solid—and through his years of working with it Blank knows that glass is a true chameleon. Because there are so many ways it can be used, he says, the glass artist needs to focus on his intent, on what it is he wants to use the material to say. Blank’s figurative work is about looking at the way things unfold, about slowing down and taking in the sublime beauty of simple things, about putting objects together in sympathetic space so that there is tension between the material and the void. He cautions to never copy nature because you will always lose. Instead, he is inspired by the human form, not in the sense that he endeavors to produce perfectly formed, anatomically correct, and realistic bodies, but in the expressionistic sense where the viewer perceives the figurative structure and experiences the narrative of the human body and its relationship to its environment. He creates work you can walk around, with multiple points of entry and interesting optical stories to pursue.

Blank’s latest exploration of form can be seen in his series Deconstructed Blue. Blank says you must be courageous to be an artist, you must be comfortable with unpredictability and willing to make something that you are not proud of and never want to share. It is through this process of questioning and failure that the artist evolves. When Blank thought about where to take his figures next, it took a lot of courage to take what he was familiar with, break it down, and emerge with something truly beautiful. He calls it a “leap of faith … to cut up the form and ruin it so that maybe, it could become something more.” He was inspired by Alberto Giacometti, the 20th century Swiss sculptor known for his tall and slender bronze figures, to take away as much of the material as possible so that the viewer could just barely see the sculpture as a figure.

For this work, Blank focused much of his attention on color, using what he calls cloisonnéd blue in reference to the ancient Chinese technique for decorating metal objects. Carefully and deliberately, Blank applies silver leaf to the glass at certain times throughout the blowing process then quenches the glass in water to capitalize on a chemical reaction between the glass and the silver. When done right, it reads as mother of pearl when it reflects the light. The layers of glass and silver leaf are then cut in planes and sawed at angles, each in accordance with the cut before so that the many gathers are visible in the final sculpture, exposed like rings on a tree. The deconstructed torso forms have a geologic quality, crystalline bodies that bounce light throughout strata of luminous glass.

Martin Blank’s glass art vibrates with a life-giving force, an aspect that reflects the man himself. Blank says great art should be like an incredible piece of music, its tone should touch you, its waves should resonate within you, and merely through your senses you should be able to perceive what the artist is trying to communicate. For Blank, the message is one of wonderment and enthusiasm, of reflecting on the natural world and engaging in an immersive experience. Blank’s glass is done with incredible thoughtfulness and intellectual rigor, inseparable from his ceaseless curiosity and constant absorption of new information. But it is also done with total spontaneity, joy, and lack of inhibition, all of which is palpable to the viewer.

Follow along with Martin Blank’s stream of creative consciousness in this 8-minute video of the inspirational trajectory of an artist’s mind.

Available work by Martin Blank

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Deconstructed Blue (with Green), 2013

Indigo and Green Lotus Pair with Leaves, 2022

Large Golden Bloom, 2021

About the artist

Whether it is a collection of flower blossoms, a monumental abstract installation, or a figurative sculpture, Martin Blank’s hot sculpted glass is made with a combination of technical exactitude and creative exuberance.  His working relationship with glass is an intimate one, as he wears heat protective clothing, gets very close, and employs his entire body while molding the molten material.  Intuitive and deliberate, he is nonetheless open to enhancing his visual vocabulary with the happy accidents of glasswork.

STUDIO FOCUS | JOHN KILEY

… a clean break

John Kiley and Dante Marioni
Cresting Reticello, 2020
14 x 14 x 5"

The last time John Kiley blew glass was for the collaboration of vessels he did with his long-time friend and colleague Dante Marioni. In this limited series of pieces, Marioni’s intricate patterns are used as the dividing membranes between two blown, cut, and polished Kiley forms. It was a genuinely synergistic collaboration of two friends who came together in the hotshop with distinct aesthetics and approaches to create singular and exceptional objects. This body of collaborative work was exhibited at Schantz Galleries last summer. When the pandemic hit a year ago, the hotshops shuttered; even though some local studios have partially opened in recent months, none can yet allow the at least 6 people it takes for Kiley to blow new work.

In some ways, the pandemic-induced closures came at an opportune moment for Kiley as he had already been using different approaches to glass outside of blowing. Ideas and techniques that had been percolating on the backburner suddenly became his only way of working. It was a clean break that gave him the freedom to look at things differently.

Kiley began making the series of works he calls Fractographs (a term he made up as it relates to the study of fractures) in 2016, but this past year they have really become a focus. They begin with large, polished blocks of colored optic glass, about 2 ½ to 3 inches thick—pristine in their transparency, purity, and hardness. A few years back, when Kiley first started working with the glass, it was with the intention of doing something architectural with 8 of the blocks. But looking at them, he felt compelled to break them, to witness the shattering of their perfect (and not inexpensive) forms, and then to mindfully piece them back together.

With the single thrust of his sledgehammer, the optic glass splinters in shards, indelibly capturing the energy and force of the artist’s motion at impact. Kiley has described the moment:

“With a single swing of a 10-pound sledge, hardened steel meets crystal plane to spill luminescence at 10,000 mph, the speed at which cracks propagate through glass.”

Like Jackson Pollock, who captured his motion and emotion through the intuitive spilling of paint on canvas, Kiley here records his movements and his mood in three dimensions. No two fractures are ever the same; in a recent interview with Urban Glass, Kiley explains that “even in a laboratory environment, using the same implement, the same size piece of glass, you would never replicate the same fracture pattern. Each one is as individual and unique as a fingerprint.”

Kiley meticulously and thoughtfully rebuilds the glass, strategically leaving pieces out to document the moment of impact and to metaphorically remind us of the common thread of the unsaid. It is a technically difficult process quite different from blowing glass, and that is a challenge that Kiley embraces. The single-colored pieces of glass take on a range of tones, darkening in the fissures where segments are bonded against each other and lightening to near transparency at the edges of the breaks. Light passes exquisitely through the cleaved blocks and casts sinewy shadows on the walls. Complexity and simplicity are in counterpoise, and the final product is one of stunning visual beauty and incredible restraint.

During the pandemic, Kiley has focused his creative energy outside the studio as well, overseeing with his wife the purchase and renovation of a new home in Seattle, with spectacular views of Puget Sound and the Olympic range. Kiley never displayed his artwork in the 800 square foot home they are leaving behind, but in this new place he is creating a wall installation in which framed niches will contain colored glass blocks (the same type he uses for the Fractographs), placed at angles to cast shadows when the western sun comes in. They will be similar in feel to his free-standing Minimalist Stacks, inspired by the California Light and Space Movement from the 1960s, which focused on perceptual phenomena such as light, volume, and scale. Kiley has always been interested in architecture—how people interact with and reconcile themselves to their surroundings. He likes thinking on architecture’s larger scale, and as an artist feels like he can similarly provide opportunities to disrupt people’s experiences and allow them space to rethink their viewpoints.

 In the last year, Kiley has also done a lot of cooking (he apprenticed in a kitchen many years ago) and taken a lot of unintentionally long walks. His forced break from the hotshop has given him a renewed excitement for that work, and he hopes to get back there as soon as May. He has two new collaborations with Marioni in the works and some blanks blown as far back as 2014 just waiting to be cut. He is also working on a new generation of fabricated Fractographs, the process for which will take about 6 months each. For these, he will draw abstract fracture patterns on the glass block, use a diamond saw to cut them, then ground, polish, and reconstruct them. His other goal as the world begins to reopen—clean his studio. His usually neat space, straightened up on a regular basis as visitors come for tours, is a bit of a wreck. Lucky are the folks who will get the chance to visit this studio in the future and get a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the stunning and unique new work of John Kiley.

At left, niches in progress at Kiley’s newly renovated house.

At right, a block of optic glass rests in one of the niches and reflects the gorgeous views outside.

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Glimpses inside Kiley’s studio, with pieces in various states of completion.

Available Work by John Kiley

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Gray and Yellow Overlap, 2021

7.5 x 7.5 x 7”

Neomydium Thermal Fractograph, 2021

8.5 x 15.25 x 2”

Rose Cross Cut, 2011

7 x 7 x 4”

Ruby Wave, 2020

5.25 x 5.25 x 5.25"

Seneca, 2016

14.5 x 13 x 13”

STUDIO FOCUS | ETHAN STERN

“The property of glass I am really drawn to, is its ability to capture light unlike any other material.”

building a creative life - together

This week, we interviewed L.A. based glass artist Ethan Stern, from his Diamond Life Studios. The studio is named for the many diamond tools uses in the cold-working process, as well as the 1984 R&B/Soul album of the same name, by artist Sade. We caught up with him as he began to pack up for his move into a new space, which he will share with his wife Amanda McDonald-Stern, a fellow glass artist. Ethan and Amanda moved to Los Angeles in December of 2018 from their former home in Seattle, where Ethan had been based since 2002.

Ethan Stern’s LA Studio space.

Ethan was promoted from Ceramics Director to the Executive Director of The Community Center of La Cañada Flintridge last March (2020). Only 15 days later, he had to close the center down due to Covid.  Not only is the center a home to the ceramics studio, but it boasts a variety of other community offerings, including a daycare. This gave Ethan many problems to solve as a non-profit administrator. “When the pandemic hit everything kind of slowed down and I felt lucky to have a place to work.” Ethan and Amanda are now moving into the new space in a different part of L.A. “We just started this transition to move into our own studio, and it is so monumental for us because it is the first time that we are going to have a chance to build it together. In the past, it had always been that we shared someone else’s space, and did not have a chance to conceptualize the studio from the ground up. This studio is in a building that also has a hot shop, and there are a number of other artists in the building, not all doing glasswork. Whether or not it will be Diamond Life Studios, we are still figuring out, but we are really excited to get it going – it’s a beautiful space!”

When Ethan and Amanda moved from Seattle to Los Angeles, he was worried he would lose his source of inspiration – “I think that the contrast between the industrial landscape of Seattle, and its proximity to the natural environment, was something that had always been really important to me.” He explained, “In Seattle you have this city plopped into the middle of the Puget Sound and then these giant mountains on both sides of it. When I moved to L.A. I was worried about not being able to be in that really rich environment, because I had never really been to L.A. except on a few short visits...”  But upon making the move he was pleasantly surprised to find that his inspiration was reborn; “I didn’t really understand that to the east and north are these huge mountain ranges that are visible from the city. So, in a way I got that really dynamic environment here as well. Some of the new work is inspired by that desert landscape, and those color waves that are real subtle earth tones, but have this amazing contrast of brown, green, yellow and gold. I am feeling super inspired here.”

Ethan Stern Artist from Fidget.tv on Vimeo.

While both are West Coast metropolises, for a glass artist, there are many differences between the small glass community found in Los Angeles and the thriving and competitive environment of Seattle that Ethan worked for the past 17 years. “The biggest contrast is just the number of artists who work in glass. Seattle is one of the glass centers of the world, and so I went there originally to work in the glass field. I spent those 17 years working in the glass industry in one way or another, whether it was my own work, working for other artists, or working for Pilchuck.” He explained, “There is so much opportunity there to stay in the field and of course the history with Chihuly and Pilchuck, and the other studios that have been in Seattle for so long, all make it really easy to immerse yourself. It is more competitive which is great, but also makes it more challenging to get a foothold. In L.A. there are a lot of glass artists but nowhere near as many compared to Seattle. The number of studios in L.A. you can count on one hand, maybe two, and you get to know all the glass artists quickly. That said, it is a really nice community here; people are really generous with information and I have found it to be really collaborative…”

Ethan’s glass work is contemporary but founded in one of the most traditional ideas in all of glass art; the vessel. “I always think about the fact that, since I was really young, my exploration of artwork has always been grounded in the vessel. Starting as a ceramic artist, I spent a lot of time investigating historical pottery and ceramics. Simple forms and the way that functional objects have been made for millennia, informs my aesthetic in a lot of ways. The glass sculpture that I make has this vessel anatomy in a way. At the same time, I want to take those principals, of say a Japanese tea bowl, and figure out how I can find my own voice. It’s really been about minimal form, and embellishing or creating surface pattern and texture that will create some kind of dynamic relationship.” Containing a very modern feel with more minimalistic forms, his work showcases surfaces that hold a complexity giving the vessel new meaning. Ethan’s pieces often contain a mix of opaque and clear glass layered in a way to trap and contain light the way a traditional vessel would contain water.

In addition to creating the blown glass forms, over half his artistic process is done by cold-working the surface of these works to create the intricate surface patterns and textures that are his true signature style. “I’ve used a lot of black of white and I have always tried to create some contrast with color. This has changed over the years. One thing I’ve been doing in my studio during the pandemic is just looking at a lot of the pieces I still have from the last ten years… Looking at those pieces, they are generally pretty devoid of color. Around 2012 or so, frankly right around when I meet Amanda, I started using a lot of color. Instead of working with really opaque glass all the time, I started making more transparent objects and started the series called Crosscut which is inspired by cut crystal or cut glass.” He told us of the evolution of his work, “I started playing with color and light and trying to capture light inside of these objects. I think what’s happening now is, I want to find a place in the middle where I can use that opaque glass which has a matte surface to absorb light instead of reflecting it. I want to try to use that in contrast with transparency or that inner light, grabbing the light and taking it inside the object.”

 “Lunar Light is a series that I started that uses the opacity of the glass and transparency to force the light into the object in a certain way…That light is forced through that space, and it gives you an opportunity to shape the light and use it as a tool almost. Oceanic inspiration can also be found in another of Ethan’s works, entitled Coast Light, 2019.  It is inspired by the eroding coast and features sections of glass cut away to mimic a coastline on its surface with contrasting blue and orange colors.

As Ethan gets ready to move, he is excited by the ability to create new work. “Amanda and I are planning on starting some collaborative design work that may end up taking on a name and life of its own here in L.A.” The thing he most looks forward to as he begins this new artistic adventure and move into the new normal, is getting back into a regular studio practice and routine, and to share and find inspiration with his wife. He tells us with palpable excitement; “Moving to Los Angeles together gave us a chance to start something together.”

With this joy for creating, there are sure to be wonderful new works coming from this new space.

Available Works

Aqua Crest, 2012

Panel #1: 24 x 9" Panel #2: 21 x 12" Panel #3: 24 x 15"

Rose Span, 2009

Blown and wheel cut lass, 12 x 29 x 6”

Grey Flag Pair, 2010

Blown and wheel cut glass, 28 x 8 x 3”; 21 x 10 x 3”

Round Ripple, 2010

Blown and wheel cut glass, L: 14 x 14 x 3”

Pocket Ln. (cedars), 2012

Blown and wheel cut glass, 15 x 15 x 4”

Polar Opposite, 2014

Blown and wheel cut glass, 16.5 x 13.5 x 3”

Lunar Light Beach, 2015

Blown and wheel cut glass, 26 x 11 x 4”

Coast Light, 2019

Blown and wheel cut glass, 17 x 7.5 x 3"

Cutclear Structure, 2017

Blown and wheel cut glass, 13 x 18.5 x 3”

Cutclear Opal Leaf, 2017

Blown and wheel cut glass, 20.5 x 12 x 4”

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New Form

STUDIO FOCUS | ARON LEAMAN

following the currents…

Aron Leaman’s graceful glass birds soar with a spirit of their own in his most recent works at Schantz Galleries. A Massachusetts native, Leaman works out of his studio space, Mill City Glass Works, in Lowell, MA, which is part of the Western Ave Studios – a space that includes 250 artists. Leaman has taught throughout New England but has been primarily working and teaching out of his own studio since 2014, turning Mill City Glass Works into a space for molten creativity.

For Leaman, the pandemic came in stages, shutting down his studio in the beginning, and coming back to find that like many he would have to adapt. Leaman’s larger sculptural works were put aside for the time and he began with smaller, more utilitarian pieces, he could make without an assistant.

From there he moved to the second stage in his pandemic creativity; making the preparatory elements of color and patterns for future pieces, as well as playing with some old techniques in glass that were new for Leaman - murrine. He used these murrine to create egg shaped vessels with bands of pattern. “I had the idea of rebirth, with everything going on [with the pandemic], and that was the shape I settled into. I don’t know what will happen with those works, but it was something I did more for me than anything else, and it was fun.”

After shutting down for the summer (part of his usual process in the hottest months of the year), Leaman came back in September with an assistant and a renewed spirit to start exploring his larger sculptures again and put that stock of prepped materials to use for his graceful, abstracted bird pieces. While these tall shorebirds are simplified, the intention is clear. “It’s a really graceful and beautiful form, you have these tall slender delicate pieces, but also very bulbous towards the bottom. I can get great curves in these. Also, in terms of a canvas I have an area where I’ll be “sketching”, where it is blown out more. That’s going to do something else to the color... it’s a really nice canvas for creating on and showing off a color scheme.”

For Leaman the birds are symbolic of home and speak to his inner connection to the ocean, something he has cherished all his life “I tend to stay near the ocean, I grew up on the ocean and it is part of me. If I don’t see it for a month or so, I start to feel it.”

On his newest birds, Leaman takes inspiration from sand bars and tidal areas. He tells us “I really love those aerial photos when they show things like that. I put a lot of lines under the surface of the glass, which for me are again those current lines and that is something I have been doing with newer color schemes – they have been all about current.” Like the tides, Sand Bars On An Outgoing Tide, 2020, seems to change throughout the day with shifting light and time, giving each piece a cycle of it’s own. (learn more in the video below…) 

Leaman’s work has a unique abstract quality. “I have always been attracted to abstract painting and less to realism. Even looking at the clouds, I am making shapes out of things I see. The patterns I use are loose -- I know how to control things and what is going to happen -- but there is always an element of surprise to the final pattern.” Leaman also likes taking the subject of birds and building on it to create a larger representation. In the work Humo Trio, 2020, 400 various lines created through his process of using cane, all come together giving it a sense of graceful movement.

In addition to his careful use of line, Leaman also often uses pieces of shattered glass to create eye catching designs. These areas of pattern in his work often take on a life of their own. “The more you look at it, the more you are going to see. One of those bubbles often times turn into an eye and then your imagination builds some kind of creature off that eye, you can’t help it. Even if something is abstract, our minds try to find a form out of it, and I like that.” To create the glass shards, Leaman takes bars of colors which he blows out to be eggshell thin, which he then shatters. When rolled up into the work, the heat creates wrinkles in the shards and traps air forming bubbles that once heated, burst and become part of the pattern. The results can be unpredictable, and this usually works in his favor to create a spontaneous abstraction.

These tall, graceful birds are mounted on granite bases with a slight metal support that both anchors the piece to the base and gives the illusion of long legs. Leaman gets bases from the castoff pile at a local a fourth generation granite quarry, where one or two times a year, he finds treasure in what they consider pieces too small to be of use. Much of the excitement of presenting birds together is the way they interact with each other “They look great in pairs, or groupings, because it creates a relationship.”

Aron and his wife Maria have two sons, Luca 5 ½ and Leon 3 ½. “One thing about the pandemic that has been good is I got to spend a lot more time with my family because I was home significantly more. That part, spending more time with the boys and my wife, has been wonderful, camping in the backyard and going to the beaches.”  As an artist, Aron is looking forward to the post-pandemic future; going to shows, talking to people and witnessing the response to his efforts. The desire to create is impossible for him to ignore, yet the sense of purpose derived from sharing the work fuels the creative spirit, and the artist has learned to flow with the current.

Aron Leaman speaks about the process and inspiration…

Video and artist portrait by Henry Marte.

Price on request

POR

Forest Currents, 2022

31 x 19.5 x 6”

Smoked Pair, 2019

Blown Glass on Granite Base, 31 x 9 x 10”

Threaded Pair, 2019

Blown Glass on Granite Base, 26.25 x 6 x 7”

Threads 2, 2019

Blown Glass on Granite Base, 36.5 x 8.5 x 6”

Untitled, 2019

Blown Glass with Granite Base, 29 x 7.5 x 8.5”