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BOND ART
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DALE CHIHULY
BOND MEETS THE AMERICAN WHO TURNED
GLASS SCULPTURE FROM A DECORATIVE RARITY
INTO MONUMENTAL FINE ART, AND TOOK IT BACK
HOME TO VENICE
Dale Chihuly seems to have single-handedly hefted
the arcane and ancient craft of glass sculpture out of
the decorative art galleries and into the fine art galleries. No major glass collection in the world would
now be complete without the impossible colors of his
glass baskets or the exuberant sprays of his vivid floral
tendrils. Chihuly’s botanical and aquatic abstractions
have evolved to become more and more extravagant,
and ever more ambitious. From the 2,000 pieces of
blown glass that make up the 40,000-lb Fiori di Como
ceiling in the lobby of Bellagio in Las Vegas, to the
swirling mass of twirling tendrils that overhangs
the entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London, Chihuly’s installations are often immense and
always breathtaking.
Glass is fragile and can break at any
time, it’s one of the qualities I love
about it
Macchia Forest, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia
Photo by Terry Rishel
Although much of his work seems to spring from floral
inspirations, Dale says, “I don’t really know much about
plants. My mother was a great, great gardener, and
we always had beautiful gardens at home. The house
was modest and in an average kind of neighborhood,
but the garden was very big. It had 90 rhododendrons
and about the same amount of azaleas, and so I think
that flowers probably had a big influence on me.” His
gruff, sandy voice belies a gentle and unaffected
tenderness, particularly when he speaks of his work.
“One of the most important inspirations for me is the
glass itself – the glassblowing process. This wondrous
event of blowing human breath down a blowpipe and
out comes this form. There’s no other material in the
world that can be blown like glass. It’s a completely
unique process for a very magical material.”
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Dale Chihuly
Photo by Stewart Charles Cohen
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Niijima Floats, 2005
Coral Gables, Florida
Photo by Teresa Nouri Rishel
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Sunset Boat, 2006
Chatsworth, Derbyshire
Photo by Terry Rishel
Chihuly’s affinity for his “magical material” has
brought him fantastic success and an outstanding
number of awards and accolades. Perhaps the
most significant and influential of these has been
the Fulbright Scholarship, and the place where
he was able to use it in 1968, in the citadel of glassblowing secrets, Murano in Venice. “I wrote to all
200 glass factories in Italy, asking if I could study
with them if I got the grant. Only one factory, the
famous Venini, sent a reply, saying I could visit for
three weeks.”
I blew a bubble, and from that
moment on I wanted to be a
glassblower
In 1291, all of the glassmakers of Venice were
required to relocate to the island of Murano, to
remove the risk of fire from the rest of the city.
From then on, the island held another purpose for
the craftsmen, to keep their secrets. Those on the
island were forbidden to leave – on pain of death
– and foreigners were almost never introduced to
the Murano techniques of avventurina, cristallo
and millefiori. Chihuly is believed to be the first
American ever allowed to study there.
“When I arrived at Venini I met the director, Ludovico de Santillana. We
became good friends. It was over there, when I immersed myself into
the Italian tradition, that I really learned about glassblowing and the
importance of teamwork. He had me make models for the factory out
of glass, plastic, and neon. I had the full run of the factory and access
to the glassblowing teams to make whatever I needed for the models.
“The teams were made up of anywhere from three to six glassblowers.
The more complicated the glass piece, the more men on the team.
I learned to understand this very well, and over the years I had as many
as 18. I returned to the United States and started the glass program
at the Rhode Island School of Design, which is the oldest and largest
art school in the United States. After that, with some friends, we
established the Pilchuck Glass School outside of Seattle, Washington,
which has become one of the premier international centers for glassart education in the world.”
That commitment to teamwork stood Chihuly in good stead through
the awful time in 1976, when the glass of a windscreen from a car crash
took out his left eye. “The accident didn’t change my perception of
the world, but it did change the way in which I worked,” he says.
“Because of the injury to my eye, and the loss of depth perception,
I had to work with my team in another way – as a director. In this role
I was able to see things, create, experiment and do things I hadn’t
been able to do before and in a much bigger way.” Three years later,
while bodysurfing, Dale dislocated his left shoulder, removing him from
any serious amount of the very physical work of glassblowing. Since
then he describes himself as “More choreographer than dancer, more
of a director than an actor.”
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Persian Chandelier, 2005
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England
Photo by Teresa Nouri Rishel
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Emerald and Ultramarine Persian Wall and
Maize Persian Set with Obsidian Lip Wraps
Dale Chihuly © Chihuly Studio
Chihuly could surely lay a credible claim to any
number of innovations in the art of glass sculpture,
yet he remains quite modest. Pressed to take some
credit, he says, “We did invent one particular technique that made a difference. When you put one
color on the outside of the glass and another color
on the inside, they would just kind of smudge
together. Well, we developed a technique where if
you put a color on the outside and then put an
opaque white on next, and then put another color
on top of that, then you could have red on the
outside and green on the inside, and the colors
would be quite separate.”
Glass wasn’t a natural field of study for the young
Chihuly. In fact, in his teens, he wasn’t very interested in studying at all. He lost his brother and his
father within about year, when he was just 15. Dale
had no interest in going to university, and it was
only at his mother’s urging that he agreed to study
interior design and architecture at Washington
University in Seattle. “There was a weaving course
as a requirement, and at the end of that quarter
I was making a tapestry, and I decided to weave
some bits of glass into it.” Pleased and fascinated
by the result, he pursued the material further. “One
night I melted some glass between four bricks in a
little oven. I took a little pipe and I gathered up
some glass, which is sort of the consistency of
honey, and I blew a bubble. From that moment on,
I wanted to be a glassblower.”
Chihuly is known for more than a dozen major series
of works, including Baskets and Cylinders in the
1970s; Seaforms, Macchia, Venetians, and Persians
in the 1980s; Niijima Floats and Chandeliers in
the 1990s and Fiori in the 2000s. In 1986, he was
honored by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais du
Louvre in Paris with a solo exhibition, Dale Chihuly
Objets de Verre. In 1995, Chihuly installed work at
the National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin near
Dublin and at Lismore Castle in Ireland. When
Venice welcomed Chihuly back in 1996 for a huge
installation called Chihuly Over Venice, he traveled
with a team to Finland, Ireland and Mexico to make
the chandeliers, which were shipped to Venice in
containers. The colored masses of glass curls, drops
and tendrils were joined by pieces Dale had made
on-site in the Vetreria Singoretto in Murano. The
spectacular confections were then suspended over
the Venetian piazzas, bridges and canals.
The installation that Chihuly made for the millennium at the Tower of David in Jerusalem covered
that ancient monument in glass sculpture. Dale
brought a climax to the mounting by installing
a wall of ice on the slope outside. About 18 huge
blocks of ice were laid outside the tower,
illuminated with blasts of colored light as, over
three days, they shrank, melted, cracked and
finally fell. “You have an idea, it comes from somewhere, you do something and it works. It comes
from somewhere deep down. You don’t know why
you do it, you don’t even know until afterwards,
maybe, what happened. It just sort of happens.”
The Jerusalem installation was visited by more
than one million people.
Dale has been invited to fill all three levels of the
Halcyon Gallery’s opening exhibition “Returning to
London to show this important collection of work
is truly exciting. The inaugural exhibition at
Halcyon Gallery, in such an incredible building,
presents the ideal space to show this work.”
Dale is perhaps best known in the United Kingdom
for the Chihuly at the V&A exhibition at the Victoria
and Albert Museum in 2001. His 27-ft-high V&A
Chandelier remains in place over the grand
entrance as a permanent exhibit. The V&A exhibition was followed in 2005 by a large site-specific
installation, Gardens of Glass, Chihuly at Kew at the
Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, which was visited
by 860,000 people. Dale loves greenhouses,
and he prefers the term “greenhouse” or
“glasshouse” to the term “conservatory”, which he
says is “more American”.
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Mille Fiori
Dale Chihuly © Chihuly Studio
“Ever since I saw the Palm House at Kew Gardens, I’ve always wanted to build a conservatory
or glasshouse. I’ve long since had an affinity and fascination with glasshouses and have had
the privilege to exhibit my work in several of them throughout the world – including the amazing
Palm House at Kew. A project we are doing back in my hometown of Seattle, Washington will
enable me to realize this dream. It will include an amazing 43-ft-tall and 44-ft-wide glasshouse
that I’m very excited about.”
He speaks with a clarity of purpose, to a point of mischief. Asked how long it takes to clean one
of his pieces, he thinks for a moment. “Well, that would depend on how clean you want it to
be.” When someone asked him, through all the hands and eyes and workshops that a piece
might go through, what is it that sets a Chihuly piece apart from all the others, he doesn’t miss
a beat: “If it’s got my signature on it, then that’s a Chihuly.”
This confident clarity could be a necessity for a man in charge of such huge projects and around
100 creative artists and technicians spread over two studio locations. San Diego Union-Tribune
reporter Erin Glass was impressed by “the vision not just of the artist Chihuly, but of the wildly
successful entrepreneur Chihuly”, whose sales were estimated in 2004 at around $29 million.
If you know exactly what you’re doing, and you can make it every
time, it’s not going to be interesting
Through his installations and the major shows that have been mounted of his work, Chihuly has
certainly helped to transform the worldwide perception of glass sculpture. His educational work
has also shifted the balance of expertise in the field. What was a relatively marginal and rarified
branch of the decorative arts, mostly learned and practiced in Venice, is now a widespread
fine-art form, one whose greatest number of artists and craftsmen now learn and practice their
art in his hometown state of Washington in the USA.
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Maize Persian Set with Obsidian Lip Wraps
Dale Chihuly © Chihuly Studio
With the ever-expanding size and complexity of his
projects, the ever-greater numbers of journeymen,
apprentices and craftsmen are likely to find plenty
of work.
“I very often push a series to its maximum size.
I think I do it to push the glassblowers to the very
edge of their technical ability. To keep the tension
high, to make it exciting. To make it so that we
don’t know whether it’s going to break, or not
break. If you know exactly what you’re doing, and
you can make it every time, it’s not going to be
interesting. It has to have this tension if the pieces
are going to be good, and so we constantly push
ourselves. I push them, they push me. I try to get
them to go beyond what they can do. It’s more
interesting that way.”
Chihuly is represented in more than 200 international museums, including the White House
Collection of American Crafts and the Royal
Collection. Private collectors include former French
president François Mitterand, Paul Allen, co-founder
of Microsoft, and Elton John. What’s coming up next
is typically more interesting to Dale than what’s
gone before. BOND asked what, among all of his
great achievements, he felt was his greatest?
“I have been very fortunate to have had many great
successes throughout my career – I’m always working
towards the next project or exhibition – so perhaps my
biggest success is yet to come.” Looking forward to this
year, he says, “I’m very excited about a project we’re
doing in my hometown of Seattle, Washington. Chihuly
Garden and Glass will be the most comprehensive
presentation of my work on public view – scheduled to
open in the spring of 2012. After that we’ll be opening
a garden exhibition at the Dallas Arboretum which will
be on view from May 5 to November 5, 2012.”
I think that flowers probably had
a big influence on me
Unpredictability, the unknowable future, is definitely
a facet of the fascination glass holds for Dale. He says,
“Glass is fragile and can break at any time, it’s one of
the qualities I love about it.” Talking about glass, he
literally lights up. “There are so many mysterious things
about glass. It’s one of the few materials that light can
pass through. The way that glass reflects and refracts
light – it’s truly amazing. You can’t carbon date it so
you can’t tell how old it is. It has its own category – it’s
not a solid, and it’s not a liquid. They don’t even know
quite what it is, except that it’s the cheapest material
in the world”
.
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Dusky Sky Chandelier
Dale Chihuly © Chihuly Studio