Chihuly | Fields of Glass

Innovative, larger than life, a visionary and a leader in his field of art as well as a major contributor to the Modern Art movement easily describes Dale Chihuly. Almost single-handedly, this extra-ordinary artist has changed the course of glass-blowing tradition with the creation of his over-sized, brilliantly lustrous pieces of sculpture. To encounter Chihuly installations is to revel in the wonder and awe of art that is both beautiful and meaningful. Through his inspired installations, we are taken on a magical journey, experienced through our senses and firing our imaginations. They can literally make your spirit soar!

“Like an explorer, you don’t want to go to places you’ve already been; you want to go someplace new.”

Taking giant leaps is nothing new for Chihuly. He has always been inspired by the challenges that are inherent with glass, and he loves to create new kinds of shapes and color combinations. He is completely comfortable in the role of explorer and innovator, bringing into this world new things never before created, thought up, or seen by humankind. His contemporary glass sculpture is loved the world over by people of all ages. Not only has this energetic artist kept in step with the demand for his creations, but he continues to nurture and grow his vision with a seemingly never-ending source of creativity.

Nashville Arts Magazine traveled recently to Seattle to catch up with this enigmatic artist to experience firsthand his creative process, and for an intriguing, behind-the-scenes look at the twenty-foot-long glass boat that will soon be on display in our city. Under Chihuly’s influence, Seattle has become a glass-blowing Mecca rivaling Murano, Italy.

“I always told students that the most important thing that they could ever do was to be around artists.”

Chihuly’s workshop is known as a “hotshop” and sits inconspicuously on Lake Union in the heart of Seattle. There are no signs trumpeting its world-renowned reputation, no fanfare—just a large, faceless, pre-fabricated building, the kind that litters industrial landscapes. But inside, it’s a whole other world.

Conjuring up images of Dante’s Inferno, nine hot ovens bubbling with flames over two thousand degrees Fahrenheit run from early morning to mid afternoon. As many as six glass blowers, called gaffers, are hard at work at any one time, pulling, firing, molding, bringing the glass to life. Surprisingly, the gaffers wear little protective gear, in some cases only sunglasses and special gloves that reach just beyond their wrists, when handling the glass in its molten state. Their movements are quick and remarkably fluid. In Chihuly’s hotshop each gaffer passes off the liquid glass from one station to another like a track team passes off a baton; once their sprint is over, it’s the next person’s job. The heat in the hotshop is unimaginable, and yet no one seems to notice or care. Each gaffer stays focused, fresh, and strong to handle the glass, to bend and to mold it into Chihuly’s vision.

“Had I not been a sculptor or an artist, I might have liked to be a film director.”

Chihuly likens his role in the creation of his work to that of a film director or architect. As a motion picture is made up of a series of moments captured on film, coming together under the director’s hand, similarly the glass-blowing process is made up of series of elements coming together toward completion. Watching Chihuly working and communicating with his team in the hotshop, it is apparent he brings together a finely tuned operation.

Just neighboring the hotshop is Chihuly’s Ballard studio where he dreams up, designs, and works with engineers, architects, and welders on his concepts for new creations. The destination for a new Chihuly masterpiece could be anywhere in the world. These days, he’s creating commissioned works that are going to Dubai, Kuwait, Makaw, and Singapore. Over the past three decades his work has traveled to hundreds of the world’s top museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Louvre where he was one of four Americans ever to have a one-man exhibition, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Prominent personalities including the Queen of England are among his ardent admirers.

Major creations have hung in Venice, Jerusalem, London, and Tokyo. His massive chandeliers grace famous entryways such as the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.Some of his most impressive works to date include “Light of Jerusalem,” a sixty-foot wall made from twenty-four enormous blocks of ice shipped from Alaska, installed in Jerusalem in 1999; a “Crystal Tree of Light” commissioned for the White House Millennium Celebration, and his largest botanical exhibit installed at the Royal Botanical Garden in Kew, England, in 2005.

From original drawings to final walk-through, every part of the design is intentional. In the museum setting, Chihuly is particularly detail oriented as to how the light will reveal his art forms, and he gives special attention to the flow of foot traffic around the pieces. His installations in botanical gardens have also caught the imagination of the art world. Here, Chihuly creates other worlds
dancing with color and light. Gigantic glass boats and big floating orbs brighten our world, transforming familiar places into extraordinary expressions. Looking remarkably like sea life resting on the ocean floor, his bright and colorful glass sculptures reflect and enhance the very nature that surrounds them.

“I had the energy to do something, and I was lucky to find something that I could do well.”

In Chihuly’s great narrative there are two irreversible events: a shoulder injury that occurred while bodysurfing, and the loss of sight in one eye, resulting from a car accident, that has prohibited the artist from blowing glass and has led him to his more omnipresent role as director and architect. Rather than letting these impediments stifle his creativity, Chihuly has used them for his benefit by focusing on his painting and creating more innovative, masterful works.

Chihuly’s excitement for color, for glass is contagious. In the creative core at his studio, everyone’s energy is centered around Chihuly’s obsession with expanding the field of light and glass to the next horizon. Up close, Dale Chihuly is a big personality, a discerning man, quick to act, and economical with his words. My meeting with him proved a rare and special occasion. He left an indelible impression—he appeared like a comet for our interview, burned brightly, and was gone just as quickly when the questions were over.

On extended view from May 9, 2010, to January 2, 2011, Chihuly at the Frist will present a variety of colorful and energetic installations designed specifically for the upper-level galleries. Selections will be drawn from the artist’s well-known series including Seaforms, Macchia, Ikebana, and Persians. Highlights include a delightful garden-like Mille Fiori composition and an impressive free-standing Tower. On May 20–22, 2010, the Nashville Symphony will celebrate a Chihuly weekend of performances, featuring Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Chihuly has created a spectacular set design for this production. At Cheekwood’s Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, Chihuly will exhibit May 25–October 31, 2010. For more information, visit Chihulyinnashville.com.

Chihuly In His Own Words

As a kid, I used to go to church where there was some beautiful stained glass. I paid more attention to that than the minister probably, but it wasn’t until I went to college and at one point started weaving tapestries that I put little pieces of glass into the tapestries. And then I got a little oven so I could melt the glass a little bit so it wouldn’t cut the tapestries, so I could smooth off the edges. One night I melted some stained glass between four bricks and put a pipe in there—it wasn’t even a blow pipe, just a regular piece of gas pipe I guess—gathered up some glass and brought it out and blew a bubble, and I had never seen glass-blowing before.

Years later I found myself in Venice, Italy, working at the famous Venini factory. And that year the Rhode Island School of Design asked if I would start a glass program, and I took that opportunity to go to such a great institution. That was in the late sixties. Throughout the seventies, I taught at RISD, and I had a remarkable batch of students. If you made a list of the best glass artists in the country, I would guess that at least ten of them would have been from RISD in the seventies.

I also started the glass school Pilchuck, which is an hour north of here, and that’s been extremely successful. We end up with four hundred to five hundred students there every summer. Some of them are beginning students; some of them are advanced students; some are professors. We get all sorts. What happened is that a lot of these students ended up wanting to be around glass as much as they could. Today there are about one thousand glass artists in Seattle and about one hundred glass shops.

In the early eighties I quit teaching, and I moved back to Seattle to be more connected with Pilchuck and more connected with my mother, who lived in Tacoma. I didn’t really have any money at that time. I was able to trade with a patron of the arts for a warehouse to work in, for some of my glass. Then a few years later I had saved up enough for a down payment, and I bought the hotshop, which is about thirty thousand square feet. Now we have about twenty people there making glass. Then glass from there is sent over here to Ballard where the sculptures are built. There are probably sixty people working in the Ballard building.

I used to show more objects, seaform sets or baskets. But over time, what I do is make mostly commissions and installations for people’s homes, businesses, lobbies. And then, the next most important thing we do is have exhibitions and museums, mostly in the United States but sometimes abroad. We do about two museum shows a year; we do about two botanical garden shows a year, which are similar in size to the museum shows. We do about four gallery exhibitions a year. So that keeps us pretty busy with all those exhibitions. Then I think we do about fifty commissions a year, which keeps us busy. And lately we’ve been doing a lot of big commissions in Kuwait, Dubai, Singapore, Makaw.

The guys and gals that head up the team are responsible for what that team does. Some of them have worked for me for twenty years and, each gaffer I deal with, probably in his or her own way. I might talk about it; I might make some drawings. I might blow glass with them for a day and then the next day look at the glass and decide, is this what I’m after.

Of course they have to be told what to do. So, like the boat—I’ll tell them make me a red and yellow boat. And then I’ll go down usually when it’s finished and look at it and say I like it or I don’t, or let’s put some orange into it. Or let’s try taking some pieces out and see what it looks like if it’s half empty. Or the opposite, let’s put some pieces on the floor and see if it’s interesting to have part of it on the floor.

The whole studio is really creative whether we’re mocking up some piece, whether we’re designing a new show, whether we’re designing a new book.

I travel to a certain degree to exotic places, but I mostly prefer to travel when I’m doing a show. I don’t really like going to Hawaii and lying on the beach for a couple weeks. That never has thrilled me, but it definitely thrills me even less now. I’m supposed to go on safari this summer—and I wouldn’t go if it weren’t for my son, Jackson, who’s about to be twelve, and that’s what they want to do. I’ll probably go for part of it. And I happen to like trains, and South Africa has what’s considered the most beautiful train in the world, kind of like the Orient Express.

Film director is a term I use a lot to describe what I do. Or architect. You know, I don’t really know how Frank Gehry works, but I can tell you that he’s got a lot of people working for him, that’s for sure. And he interacts with them mostly, I think, on the level of making models. You know, and again, probably like me, he probably has certain people who have worked for him for a long time. And they are responsible for making it work. Probably even harder in his case because they have all that engineering, computer stuff to figure out for those steel buildings. And I think he was one of the first architects to creatively use all those shapes in such a way that I don’t think he could build those buildings if it weren’t for computers; they’d just be too hard to figure out. And a film director—as you know, they work in different ways. Some of them like to look in the camera to see what the shot is.

I went on the set of the making of the film Lethal Weapon. Richard Donner was the director, and Mel Gibson, Joe Pesci, and Danny Glover were in it. So I went there, and they were going to do a big scene where they blow up a boat, like a three-hundred-foot boat, and all those guys are coming up in a speedboat; they were the cops I guess. But interestingly, I went out on the boat with the director and the cameraman. The cameraman didn’t have any camera. There were five other guys who were shooting this scene from other places, and Donner and the camera guy never even talked about the movie whatsoever. We were out there for half an hour until they got ready to shoot, and finally when it’s action, they’re looking at five different videos, and from that point he could probably tell them what to do. The way they did it, they obviously oversaw everything the way it had to be overseen.

We are in the process of designing a museum, a Chihuly museum, with a beautiful garden, with an exquisite glass conservatory in the middle of the garden, with a restaurant and a museum store and a small auditorium. And we’re hoping it will be completed by spring. So that’s the biggest project I’ve ever done. And, fortunately, I’ve got a lot of great, creative, talented people working with me, or I could never even think about doing that project! That’s why you’re lucky to have people who can work with you, just like making a movie—there are like two or three hundred people out there on that set. And they’ve figured out how to do it somehow. And it takes a lot of people and a lot of money.

by Katie Sulkowski  |  photography by Jerry Atnip