On Sunday I leave for Pilchuck Glass School.   Pilchuck was founded in 1971 by Dale Chihuly and patrons Anne Gould Hauberg and John H. Hauberg, and has become the most comprehensive educational center in the world for artists working in glass.  

Early in my career, I had the pleasure of studying at Pilchuck three summers in a row.  The school is equipped with a wealth of work spaces, tools, materials, and people to help in every manner of working with glass, as well as wood and metal shops. 

Next week a group of 10 flameworkers will meet for a week-long self-directed residency. Our purpose has nothing to do with making a bunch of work. We are gathering to discuss art, career and business, the future of glass in the arts, the future of our own work and careers, to experiment with new techniques or projects, and mostly to learn from each other. Steve Klein is leading a group of glass casters at the same time, so there will be opportunity to cross-pollinate ideas and thinking.

I am greatly looking forward to this opportunity to learn from and contribute to my colleagues.  I give thanks to artist Elizabeth Mears, for organizing our reisdency!

http://www.elizabethmears.com/

www.Pilchuck.com

This week I am working on a commissioned piece for a client in Sarasota, Florida. She lives in a penthouse overlooking a waterway and the piece will go on her bedroom wall. This is not just a bedroom, but a dream bedroom – all white with crisp Irish linens, silver bed, Italian mirrored nightstands, and creamy cashmere walls.

I am making a clear glass tree with a secret, surprise element. I will sandblast the tree for a frosted appearance, and so the tree can be “read” more easily (Shane Fero taught me about taking the distracting shine off glass so we can “read” it more easily). 

The main trunk of the tree is nearly complete and the branches are sketched with yarn.   Overall size is approximately 55″h x 46″w x 8″d.

Imagine the tree mounted 2″ off the wall with a light about 3 feet away to the bottom left.   The tree will be lit and beautiful shadows will be cast along the wall and up onto the ceiling.

I’ll post more images as I complete the tree and it is installed.  Once the client has received it, I will divulge the surprise element.

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of visiting the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see the Glass Flower collection. 

This unique collection of over 3,000 models of 847 plant species was created by glass artisans Leopold Blaschka and his son, Rudolph. 

Professor George Lincoln Goodale, founder of the Botanical Museum, wanted life-like representatives of the plant kingdom for teaching botany.  Leopold, who was already highly acclaimed for his beautifully detailed glass models of sea creatures for natural history museums and aquaria around the world, was commissioned to make a few samples.  They were so extraordinarily life-like that Mrs. Elizabeth C. Ware and her daughter Mary Lee Ware financed the commission for the remaining models and presented it to Harvard University as a memorial to Dr. Charles Eliot Ware, class of 1834.

Rudolf worked with his father on the project for the first five years until Leopold died in 1895, then continued alone until 1936, three years before his own death.  Rudolf supplied more than 4,000 glass flower models to the Harvard museum, with remarkably accurate anatomical sections and enlarged flower parts.  Since the Glass Flowers are always in bloom, tropical and temperate species may be studied year-round.

Each specimen consisted of a model of a life-size section of branch or piece of the plant, exquisite, enlarged stamen and pistols or other important parts, and cross section slices of the ovaries.

With their unsurpassed technical mastery, the Blaschka Flowers are the holy grail of flameworking.  Artists and artisans make pilgrimages from around the world to see them.  As both a flameworker and plant lover, I was thrilled to see this collection.  The pieces are exquisitely and impeccably detailed; the craftsmanship and technical prowess are stunning! 

I spent perhaps an hour just “being with” the flowers, marveling at their beauty, their perfect likeness to nature, and the technical accomplishments of the Blaschkas.  After some time I realized I was most drawn to the enlarged stamen and the interesting variety of their shapes.  I look forward to playing with some of these forms and bringing them into my own work. 

http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/on_exhibit/the_glass_flowers.html

Today I am applying the images to my autobiographical cyclone.  After messing around with various possibilities, I copied the images onto glassine, a translucent paper. 

The images are faint, with the ghostly quality I wanted.  Some are legible, others probably not unless someone is familiar with the scenes.  This is the quality I am after.  The images are like memories - ephemeral, changing with time, and two people remembering a shared incident can have completely different memories. 

I’m adding images and more threads as I go.  Once these are all complete, I will make a hanging apparatus and install the piece.

(My photography skills are quite lacking, as evidenced here.  I apologize for that!)

The structure of the reed and thread cyclone is nearly complete.

Time to start digging through old photo albums for the images to go on it.  I have figured out how to print onto a transparent paper called Glassine.  I will make up a small cyclone to do tests on, as I have to figure out how to adhere the images to get the ghost-like quality I want.