Fall 2008 / Issue 112add to cart
Editor's Letter
In the early years of the Studio Glass movement, it was the pure theater of glassblowing that took center stage at public demonstrations and in the university art departments where hot glass had caught the imagination at art departments. What could possibly be more exciting or vital than an artist literally breathing life into his or her sculptural piece? Other, more time-intensive techniques of working with glass, such as pate de verre, glass casting, fusing, or flameworking, took much longer to be accepted, or to find a wide following in the United States.
That began to change with the arrival of European masters such as Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslova Brychtova, Klaus Moje, and Bertil Vallien, who brought a new level of advance planning to the making of sculpture with glass. Their more deliberate approach would affect all artists working with the material. Today, more than four decades after Harvey Littleton's 1962 glassblowing workshop heralded the start of the American Studio Glass movement, a wide range of techniques have been brought under the umbrella of "Studio Glass".
While this issue of GLASS does have a feature article on two of the most widely acclaimed glassblowers, Lino Tagliapietra and William Morris, who have been featured in two documentary films, we have made a concerted effort to look at casting.
Our cover article is about Karen LaMonte, who has been pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished in glass in her castings of the human figure and drapery. This remarkable work is breaking new ground not only technically but in its exploration of presence, absence, and the nature of being. We are pleased to publish GLASS contributing editor William Ganis's extensive interview with LaMonte that illuminates this important sculptural direction only possible in the material of glass.
Mexican-born artist Ana Thiel infuses all of her projects with a deep respect for place and approaches her work like a forensic operation, sifting the landscape for clues to forgotten natural and human histories. Her residency in rural France yielded a nuanced and textured body of work that includes "imprints" of the hollow of a tree, an indentation in a rock, and the architectural details of a Roman fountain.
Throughout his career, Clifford Rainey has used the malleability of cast glass, its ability to take on such a wide variety of shapes, in service of his artistic investigations and responses to political and social issues. On the occasion of his major retrospective exhibition in Portland, Oregon, Richard Speer takes stock of Rainey's notable career.
Finally, we turn our attention to flameworking as we present a provocation to the world of paperweight artists, whose work is among the most conservative in the field of glass. Robin Rice asks why there haven't been any radically different approaches to shake the paperweight world from its backward gaze, no figure to emerge such as Judith Schaechter, who turned the world of stained glass on its ear with bold and contemporary subject matter. To understand where paperweights may go next, Rice takes us on a highly detailed journey through the past and points to encouraging signs from the contemporary scene. A sidebar from American maestro Paul Stankard completes the package, with his selection of five up-and-coming artists who may well supply the answer to Rice's question.