Glass Making

William Morris viewed glass as a way to recreate ancient archeological artifacts—items that looked like they were made of bone, sinew, or fiber. He turned glass into objects that looked like something else completely—an animal’s horn or a skin flask. John Ruskin was a philosopher and art critic who viewed Venice as the epicenter of artwork and a city that was a work of art in and of itself. This concept was passed on to Dale Chihuly, who welcomed the artistic philosophy that art is comprised of a dynamic in which color and space play integral parts. Chihuly’s glass making has a little bit of Morris and a little bit of Ruskin in it in the sense that his objects are dynamically produced—full of color and life—and yet so unlike other glass artifacts that they have a life all their own. They explode outward as though they were real objects not made of glass but rather possessing their own substance, like one of Morris’s objects or like Venice itself possessed its own soul, according to Ruskin.

This type of art is different from artists such as Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso in the sense that their works tend to be abstract. Pollock is known for his abstract paintings in which paint is literally spilled across a canvas; Picasso is known for his abstract, cubist and surreal paintings and drawings that depict life in a modern style—discombobulated and fragmented. Chihuly’s style is unlike these modern artists in the sense that he is creating something concrete—turning glass into sculpture so to speak. His works are not surreal or abstract but rather have a firm, tangible reference point—whether it is the sun or flora in the environment. They reflect something found in nature and have not so much of an abstract quality to them as they do an imaginative and vibrant quality to them that harkens back to something that might be found in the sea among the colorful coral reefs.