The Alchemy of Glass

I studied under Roger Darricarrère, a Basque painter who arrived from France and began his studio in 1954 in Los Angeles.  It was the first hot glass studio in America since Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained glass studio closed in the early 20th century.  Darricarrère's idea was creating dalle-de-verre windows (installations of inch-thick colored chunks of glass set in cement).  Darricarrère showed me how light can play on the depths created inside a thick glass body.  Working with hot glass, fresh out of college, I made a window out of dalle-de-verre, and wondered at making integral designs of glass, uninterrupted by other materials.

I love the interplay between glass and light.  Opacifying agents, when added to glass, produce myriad shadow and texture within the glass, controlling the amount of light passing through the object.  The effect is that of a glowing object, alive with light.

I started my own studio in 1977, casting sheet glass and dalle-de-verre, and experimenting with fusing in Santa Cruz.  I became a graduate student in 1983, under the glass-blowing pioneer, Marvin Lipofsky, studying painting and sculpture, and learning where my work would fit in the contemporary world of art.  I learned how to illustrate my ideas, with watercolor and acrylic paintings

The wonder of fusing is that it can erase your tracks.  I like to compare my works with Roy Lichtenstein’s, whose different patterns were collaged together.  My sculptures are joined by glass, at temperatures that meld edges, creating hard and soft edged windows of glass.  I discovered that fragments of glass with small streaks of color will fuse into the clear block of the whole, becoming a colored mark suspended in the space of clear solid glass.  Experiments with sheet glass and fusing led to work with thicker glass to see more interior space.  The challenge, to create internal spaces in glass, came with a host of problems, from annealing, to revealing the interior (polishing).

In 1990, I equipped my new studio in with stone working tools, and began to carve and polish glass with grinders and stone polishing polishers.  I now had direct control over the quality of the surfaces of large slabs, allowing them to take their place as architectural units with polished plate glass surfaces.

Lately, I have been thinking of the glass body as an alternative space.  When you stand next to my work, a form appears that cannot exist, yet there it is, suspended in the glass body like a three dimensional painting.  This is not negative space.

In recent art language, alternative spaces have been designated as places where non-standard or experimental ideas can happen.  Theses spaces apply new rules to our ideas of dimension and gravity.  Paintings become three dimensional, creating a world of paradox.  The application of light transforms the inside of a transparent stone like material to a world of light and color.

The key to how an object is made is to know what needs to be done to finish it.  My process is one of building forms using fused color trails, surrounding them with clear glass, and polishing after the work has been annealed.  The true finish is when light pierces my sculpture.  If you are drawn into the void and find a new world, I have done my job.