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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.azcentral.com/ent/arts/articles/2008/11/14/20081114glassart.html">http://www.azcentral.com/ent/arts/articles/2008/11/14/20081114glassart.html</a><br>
<h1 class="topHeadline">Learn the secrets of glass art</h1>
<h2 class="subHeadline">American glassblowers breathe new life into Old
World art</h2>
<p class="byline vcard clearfix"> <a
href="http://www.azcentral.com/ent/arts/articles/2008/11/14/20081114glassart.html#comments"><span
class="bylinecomments" id="commentcount"></span></a> by <strong>Richard
Nilsen</strong> - Nov. 14, 2008 12:00 AM<br>
<span class="org">The Arizona Republic</span> </p>
<p>There's no mystery to the popularity of glass art.</p>
<p>"Glass transmits light, it reflects light, it refracts light,"
Seattle artist Benjamin Moore says. "Glass is a magical medium."</p>
<p>For Scottsdale glass artist Newt Grover, "It is the colors and the
transparency. They are effects you cannot get in any other medium."<br>
</p>
<p>Even for the world-famous Dale Chihuly, the answer is simple: "Glass
is popular because light goes through it. Only four things can do that:
gemstones like diamonds; ice; water; and glass - and glass does it
best."</p>
<p><b>To work in glass is to work in light.</b> </p>
<p>All three artists are part of the American Studio Glass Movement, a
community of those working in the medium that has grown from only a few
practitioners in the 1960s to a point where, currently, the Glass Art
Society in Seattle has 3,800 members in 58 countries.</p>
<p>Glass has spread.</p>
<p>"It really began in Toledo, Ohio, in 1962, when Harvey Littleton
arranged a glassblowing exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art," Moore
says. </p>
<p>Littleton later established a glass program at the University of
Wisconsin. </p>
<p>"It has flourished since then," Moore says. "There are at least 20
or 30 university programs now."</p>
<p>Littleton's students, including Chihuly and Marvin Lipofsky, have
spread the art and techniques. Chihuly's 25,000-square-foot studio in
Seattle, called the Boathouse, is now the world's largest, and scores
of other artists, often trained by Chihuly or his Pilchuck Glass
School, have moved to the area, making Seattle the largest
concentration of glass artists in the world.</p>
<p>"Harvey is the one who really went out and started to get people to
think about working in glass," Chihuly says. "His influence is the
biggest one, getting everyone together."</p>
<p>Now it's Chihuly who is most influential.</p>
<p>"He's done more for art glass than anyone," Grover says. "Chihuly
and art glass are not separable."</p>
<p>Chihuly is bringing an installation of his art to the Desert
Botanical Garden this week for a six-month stay. </p>
<h3>Long history </h3>
<p>But that doesn't mean the subject ends with Chihuly. Glass has a
long history, beginning in the ancient Middle East. No one knows
exactly when and where glass was invented, but as far as art goes,
Egyptians worked in a kind of glass, a vitrified enamel on small
sculptural forms. Glassblowing on an industrial scale began with the
Romans.</p>
<p>"Glass has been used as a sculptural medium for over 2,000 years,"
says Suzanne Franz, a freelance glass curator and former curator at the
Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y. "They blew them in the shapes
of heads, figures, fruit. In a way, there hasn't been anything invented
since the Romans."</p>
<p>But most of the Roman work was functional: glasses, bottles, jars.
To find the point where the purely aesthetic properties of glass took
hold, you have to go to northern France in the 12th century and the
development of Gothic architecture. There, colored-glass windows became
not merely functional, but spiritual.</p>
<p>The Abbot Suger, who oversaw the construction of the first Gothic
cathedral, Basilica St. Denis in Paris,<b> </b><b>saw light as a
metaphor of the
divine</b> and sought a way to incorporate light into his architecture.
By
opening up his walls, it meant he could fill them in with images in
colored glass.</p>
<p>No one who has spent time with the great rose windows in Chartres or
Paris can fail to be moved by the luminous quality of their designs.</p>
<p>For Suger, awash in the Neoplatonism of his time, had <b>three
Latin
words to describe light. "Lux" was the everyday sunlight that everyone
shared; "lumen" was the sanctified colored light that came through the
stained-glass windows and transformed the interior of his church; and
"illumination" was the spiritual effect that had on the individual who
took in this light through his senses.</b></p>
<p>But you don't have to believe in the divine to see how the light
coming through glass can have an emotional effect on the viewer. If all
art is essentially metaphorical, the essential metaphor of glass is
radiance, the transfiguration of the world.</p>
<p>"The alchemy of glass is what's so exciting," says Pamela Koss,
executive director of the Glass Art Society. </p>
<h3>Murano industry </h3>
<p>Glass took a great leap forward in the 13th century, when an
industry was set up on the Venetian island of Murano. That industry is
still in business, and until this century it was the most influential
element in glass art. It developed many of the prime techniques still
used: Much of the glassmaking industry uses Italian terms, much as
musicians do. The glass-art vocabulary includes lattimo, millefiori,
smalto, latticino, avventurina and incalmo. </p>
<p>Each factory on the island developed its secrets and specialties. </p>
<p>"Murano is a magical place," Moore says. "It has been there since
the 13th century, isolated because of the danger of fire, but also to
keep its secrets. It's in decline now. When I was there in the late
'70s, there were 150 factories. Now there's maybe 50. The number of
people working has gone from the thousands to the hundreds. </p>
<p>"You walk down the streets of Murano now and see glass for sale made
in China or India, where it's cheaper. It's a dying culture."</p>
<p>Besides, says Franz, "It's hard to get young people interested in
working in a factory."</p>
<p>But in the 19th century, Venetian glass was still state-of-the-art.
There was a large public for Venetian craftsmanship, as well as a
number of outsiders who wanted to learn glass and take it in other
directions. You probably have heard their names: Rend Lalique, Louis
Comfort Tiffany, Emile Galle, the Daum brothers. They worked glass,
discovering many new techniques and surface treatments. The Art Nouveau
and Art Deco traditions they worked in were enormously popular, and
their businesses flourished.</p>
<p>"That period has had an extraordinary influence on artists of the
Studio Glass Movement," says Susan Warner of the Museum of Glass in
Tacoma, Wash. "You think of Tiffany and the extraordinary use of
surface, and Carlos Scarpa, and other fantastic designers, taking
material to make real breakthrough statements."</p>
<p>Scarpa was an architect, but he created many glass designs for the
Venini Glass Works in Venice.</p>
<p>After World War II, there was a revival of interest in craft arts in
the U.S. The Black Mountain School in North Carolina, among other
places, elevated ceramics and other crafts to a fine art, and by the
1960s, craft was enjoying a true renaissance. Glass became part of that
when Littleton shifted his allegiance from pottery to glass.</p>
<h3>Shared experience </h3>
<p>Part of the ethos of the '60s was that art should be a shared, not
private, experience. The culture of secrecy kept by the Venetians made
no sense to the Boomers now swelling the ranks of the American Studio
Glass Movement.</p>
<p>"Murano was closed and conservative," Moore says. "You didn't just
walk into another factory unless you had been personally invited by the
master of that company. But the American sensibility was one of
sharing. Back in the '60s and '70s, everyone shared and worked
together."</p>
<p>A few Italian masters recognized this and began working with the
Americans. One of them was Lino Tagliatpietra, among the most respected
of the Venetians.</p>
<p>"One of the reasons Lino came over was that he saw what was going on
here as something special," Moore said. "He thinks of his culture as
dying, and here in America, it's no holds barred, share ideas and work
together."</p>
<p>It's one of the special qualities of glass workers. </p>
<p>"We don't hold our secrets," Chihuly says. "We all work in teams of
five to 10 people, and not even a thought of hiding something.
Venetians came over and worked with us."</p>
<p>There are other glass movements around the world, in the Czech
Republic, Japan and elsewhere, but all of them owe something to the
Americans. </p>
<p>"As glass cultures, old commercial cultures are dying everywhere,
from Bavaria to Austria to Venice, falling to industrialization and
mechanization, a lot of old craftsmen are going by the wayside," Moore
says. </p>
<p>"It is the beauty of the American studio movement that it can
amalgamate the various glass cultures, in our own vegetable-soup way of
working with the material, and make a new statement in the medium."<br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.azcentral.com/ent/arts/articles/2008/11/14/20081114glassartstudio.html">http://www.azcentral.com/ent/arts/articles/2008/11/14/20081114glassartstudio.html</a><br>
</p>
<h1 class="topHeadline">Scottsdale artist describes glass craft</h1>
<p class="byline vcard clearfix"> <a
href="http://www.azcentral.com/ent/arts/articles/2008/11/14/20081114glassartstudio.html#comments"><span
class="bylinecomments" id="commentcount"></span></a> by <strong>Richard
Nilsen</strong> - Nov. 14, 2008 12:00 AM<br>
<span class="org">The Arizona Republic</span> </p>
<div id="articlestory">
<p>"It's
like getting into your car when it's parked outside in the middle of
the summer," says Scottsdale glass artist Newt Grover. "When you work
in a studio in front of a furnace, you get this blast of hot air. You
definitely feel the heat."</p>
<p>Grover, who runs Newt Glass (<a href="http://www.newtglass.com"
target="_"">newtglass.com</a>), has been a glassblower for 11 years,
making both practical work and art designs.</p>
<p>"The furnace runs roughly at 2,000 degrees (Fahrenheit) and it runs
24/7," he says. "It takes two days to come up to temperature and longer
than that to cool down."
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<p>Typically, the furnace runs continuously for two years at a time,
cooled only for repairs and maintenance. His natural-gas bill runs up
to $2,500 a month. </p>
<p>The furnace takes pride of place in the center of his
1,000-square-foot concrete-and-steel studio. The furnace is about 4
feet around and 6 feet high, with a small door that opens to the
crucible of molten glass. </p>
<p>"The glass looks orange when hot," he says. "Visitors sometimes ask,
'Do you make anything that's not orange?' But no, that's just the heat."</p>
<p>It's one of a series of questions that seem to come up every time.</p>
<p>"Like 'Do you burn yourself?' No, not a lot. If you're used to
working around anything, you get used to it so you don't hurt yourself."</p>
<p>Or, "How hot is that blowpipe?"</p>
<p>"The pipe is four-and-a-half-feet long. The end where you gather can
be 1,200 to 1,500 degrees, but where you hold it, it's room
temperature."</p>
<p>Another FAQ: "How hard do you have to blow?"</p>
<p>"Depends on how hot the glass is. If it's cold, it's not going to
move at all."</p>
<p>The hotter the glass is, the more liquid. </p>
<p>"It doesn't have a melting point, like water," he says. "It's a
constant variation from liquid to solid, with all stages of viscosity
in between."</p>
<p>Grover works his studio with paid apprentices. They get to use the
furnace when Grover isn't working on something.</p>
<p>"I usually have two or three assistants when I'm blowing glass," he
says. "If it's a bigger piece, I may need four or five."</p>
<p>One person will hold the blowpipe and inflate the hot glass, while
others will use various wooden paddles and metal snips to cut, shape
and fashion the glass. </p>
<p>"Glass is like ceramics, but instead of being worked vertically on a
potter's wheel, it has to be kept turning horizontally as you work it,
so the soft glass doesn't sag.</p>
<p>"A lot of the tools are green wood, and you get a kind of burned
wood smell, and you use a lot of newspaper, upwards of 20 sheets,
folded into a pad and soaking wet, to be able to shape the glass. It's
the closest thing you get to actually holding the hot glass. But it
leaves a smell. </p>
<p>"Hot shops have a distinctive odor," Grover says. It's a mixture of
burning wood, steaming newspaper and the beeswax used to lubricate the
process.</p>
<p>"And there's generally a lot of sweat in that mix." </p>
<p>Grover began as a jewelrymaker but moved into neon in the 1980s.
Most of his work was commercial signage, and he soon got bored with it.
For the past decade, it has been all glass.</p>
<p><b>"For me, it's the colors and the transparency," he says. "There
are
effects you cannot get in any other medium. It's addictive, more
addictive that heroin or crack."</b></p>
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