Dale Chihuly, then, is a new breed of artist in a medium barely two decades old. It is safe to say he is the most noted artist working in glass today. He makes up for the centuries of well-kept technical secrets, the inaccessibility of equipment, and the relegation to a second-class medium that have prompted artists to ignore glass as an art form. In his flamboyant approach to glassblowing Chihuly is like a theatrical director of a road show. So far, in 1982, he has assembled his crew in six states to make glass. With his energetic, peripatetic ways, Chihuly is greatly helping to take creative glassblowing out of obscurity and into museums and galleries across the country.
D.C.
It's a big show, this glassblowing. One critic who watched
me at work with my group said I reminded him of P.T. Barnum.
L.T.
Where do you get your workers?
D.C.
I fly them in from here and there. It's not always the same crew.
They interchange. From 1970 to 1974 I always worked with Jamie
Carpenter. Now, I work with three or four people, usually former
students, who are now artists or craftsmen with their own careers.
When we don't work here at RISD, we go to different places and
work intensely for about two weeks. I get up at 4 A.M. and get
to work by 5. We work straight through without a coffee break.
I don't want to stop the momentum. For meals I have a cook provide
whatever they want to eat and drink. After two weeks everyone
is exhausted. I work less than a quarter of the year. When we
reconvene, it's in a different location. It spurs energy. Coming
back to the same place is anticlimactic.
L.T.
Do they do the glassblowing for you?
D.C.
Yes, and I do it, too.
L.T.:
And, of course, it's your design.
D.C.
Yes, I do drawings while they're working. I never drew until a
couple of years ago.
L.T.
Your drawings are wonderful, very vital and natural.
D.C.
As the years have gone by, I have relinquished more of the making
of the glass. I am more effective as the director of the team
than as a finisher or gaffer. I oversee all the positions. Each
person has a specific thing to do. The first person starts with
the color and must know just what I want. Then, it goes into the
optical mold. Then, it's decorated, and ultimately, it goes to
the master. Sometimes I'm drawing; sometimes I'm working. I go
where I'm needed. And if something goes wrong with the team, I
can sense it. I know when the relationship between two people
is not right or if someone is hung over or depressed. I can jack
them up. If one person is a bit off, it throws off the whole team.
If the master in a glass factory doesn't feel well, everyone goes
home. He's like a prima donna.
L.T.
Do most glass artists work in teams?
D.C.
Oddly enough, not now. Through the two thousand years of the blowpipe,
however, it has always been done in teams. Glass itself has been
around for four thousand years. It has a great history. The equipment
is the same as that invented by the Romans. From the twelfth to
the sixteenth centuries, the Venetians developed the craft to
a high degree. They put all the glassblowers on the small island
of Murano in the Venetian Lagoon. The purpose was to maintain
the fires and to preserve the secrets. There were two hundred
factories with several hundred workers each. You can imagine how
many glassblowers there were on this small island a couple of
miles long. They were not allowed to leave on penalty of death.
If they managed to escape, their families were executed. If they
got to England, they were knighted. It took a couple of centuries
for the secrets to get out into the rest of Europe. Because of
the strong tradition of secrecy, even in this day it's very difficult
to get into glass factories, and then, nobody tells you how to
do anything. So, it was never possible in all the centuries of
glassblowing for any artist interested in working with glass to
learn anything about it. You know how artists are-if they can't
get to glass, they'll use clay or some other material.
L.T.
So glass then was maintained for commerce rather than art.
D.C.
Yes. You'll find no individuals emerging as you do in other media
like sculpture, painting, or architecture. Tiffany and Lalique
were really designers whose glass was mass-produced. I don't know
how many windows Tiffany made-maybe tens of thousands. Since the
windows were commissioned, you could say there were art. But I
have some trouble with the windows, even though the glass was
wonderful. Someone may be very good at making glass, but the attitude
is very different when it's made for a factory. Picasso made more
drawings than Tiffany made designs, but he did it with a noncommercial
attitude. The first glass artist to emerge was Maurice Marinot,
a Fauvist. His friend owned a glass factory, so he was able to
learn how to blow glass. Tiffany and Lalique didn't know how to
blow glass.
L.T.
Where do you rate Steuben?
D.C.
This is the most famous of American glass factories. It makes
wonderful glass, but I'm not interested in glass factories and
designing glass. I have designed for Steuben and for Venini, a
famous glass factory in Italy. I prefer to make unique pieces
of my own choosing. If someone wants to buy them, fine; if not,
fine.
L.T.
Then you're really a sculptor.
D.C.
I stay clear of the argument between art and craft.
L.T.
How did glass as an art medium get started in this country?
D.C.
What's called the studio art movement started at the University
of Wisconsin through the efforts of Harvey Littleton, a ceramist
and the son of a glass scientist at Corning Laboratories. Now,
after two thousand years of the history of glassblowing, it is
the universities that are the patrons of the studio glass movement.
Unless you are independently wealthy, you couldn't afford to build
a studio and blow glass for a few years until you got good enough
to have sales. It costs me over a thousand dollars a day to work,
but I'm excessive. I'm excessive in most everything I do.
L.T.
You've been teaching for a long time.
D.C.
For about ten years at RISD. I've been an artist-in-residence
for the past two or three years. I also started my own school
on the West Coast, the Pilchuck Glass Center, in Washington State,
the only school devoted entirely to glass. It now has a faculty
of thirty-five in the summer. For ten years I was at RISD in the
winter and Pichuck in the summer, in addition to putting on lots
of exhibitions. I wanted to spend more time with my work. So now
I function as an example to students. That's how I learned.
L.T.
How did you get into glass in the first place?
D.C.
I was taking a weaving course toward a degree in interior design.
The teacher asked us to incorporate other materials. I chose glass,
which was an odd idea. I had to fire the glass so it would have
smooth edges and not cut the weaving. By the time I graduated
in 1965, I had a pretty good knowledge of glass. Even though I
went to work as a designer for an architect, I spent most of my
time working with glass. One odd part to this story is that without
ever having seen glassblowing, I melted some glass and blew it
with a pipe I found in the basement. That was really exciting.
In the meantime I had received a Fulbright for weaving. But the
host country, Finland, rejected me, because so many Americans
had ripped it off in the sixties. So, as fate would have it, I
ended up studying glassblowing at the University of Wisconsin
and really got into it. As an interior designer I didn't really
know anything about fine art, but right away I started to do sculptural
things. I also started for the first time to hang around artists.
I was twenty-three. It opened my eyes to see how artists thought,
worked, functioned, and even cooked. The best possible way for
a young person to get an art education is to be in the presence
of artists. In school you learn the most from your peers. Pilchuck
is set up under that premise. The faculty is there to work and
the students assist them and do their own work. The teamwork approach
is right for me. The life of an artist can be a very solitary
one, and I like to be around people and to work with them. So
the essence of my work is in two things: collaboration and spontaneity.
L.T.
They would seem to be mutually exclusive. To get spontaneity with
a group effort seems nearly impossible.
D.C.
That's an interesting point. However, the system works for me.
The people I choose have to make a lot of quick decisions. Glass
is a very quick medium. My work relies on heat and gravity. It
develops in the furnace. We use hardly any tools.
L.T.
Can you make changes?
D.C.
Usually not.
L.T.
Can you reheat?
D.C.:
Hardly ever. In fact, I push my workers to eliminate steps. I
like to be able to do it in one breath. Poof! There it is!
L.T.
There is definitely an immediacy to your work.
D.C.
That's what I strive for.
L.T.:
Your forms always seem to relate to the sea.
D.C.:
The Seaforms series came from what I call the Pilchuck Basket
series, which began in 1977. It was inspired by Indian baskets
standing crumpled in a museum storage area. I wanted to blow glass
as thin as a basket. I started piling my pieces together although
that was not the original intention. So they became sculptural.
Without my realizing it, they evolved into sea forms: shells,
jellyfish, and urchins. I was so involved in making the shapes
and working with the color that someone else had to point out
that similarity to me. I'm not concerned with my source material
and I'm not particularly conceptual. The shell forms got bigger,
thinner, and more elegant. We couldn't make them thinner or more
refined. I had reached the maximum and felt I wanted to work in
a cruder way-not that this new series is really crude.
L.T.:
It's very varied and rich looking. What do you call it?
D.C.:
It's called Macchia, which means "spotted" in Italian. It also
means sketch or speckle. The name was suggested by Italo Scanga,
and Italian artist, who is my mentor. Some of the colors are very
garish. They are still vessel shapes. Often there's an opaque
color inside and an almost opaque contrasting color outside.
L.T.:
This one is my favorite. I can hardly keep my hand out of it.
It's a marine hideout.
D.C.:
No matter what I do it seems to come from the sea. A diver told
me the colors I'm using are in the depths of the sea.
L.T.:
Well, you practically live in it in this boathouse on Pawtuxet
Cove.
D.C.:
And I have a green bathtub four feet by seven feet in front of
this huge window. I like the idea of being in water while looking
at water.
L.T.:
Your assistant, Danny, told me how vital photography is to your
work, that most people know your work through reproductions in
magazines and journals and that photography is for you a way of
controlling how people see your work. The multitudes of slides
and the combination storage and viewing cabinets with built-in
lights and sliding panels of transparencies are worthy of the
finest museum slide library.
D.C.:
That's right. I have a particular interest in photography. As
we sit here there is a photographer downstairs photographing my
work to my specifications. I will be having shows in four museums:
Phoenix, Tucson, San Diego, and St. Louis. We are taking the occasion
to produce a catalog with fifty-three color plates nine by twelve
inches. There will be a few black-and-whites.
As Chihuly said of himself, he does everything in excess. His is also able to do many things simultaneously. While giving himself over to the interview, he was aware of and in control of the sights and sounds around him. During our conversation he designed ensembles of his work for the photographer and discussed with him the music filling the room. Without compromising his work, he can be involved fully in both the aesthetics and economics of his career. Only a highly charged, magnetic personality can direct a team of artists in producing a unique creation in such a no-room-for-error medium as glass. Not only does he perform as a circus ringmaster, he could, no doubt, fill in for the juggler at the same time.
Published in Art New England. (July/August 1982): 16-17.
