Dale Chihuly
(1941 - ) |
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Blown Glass Art Work
| Name: |
Dale Chihuly |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Tacoma, Washington |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Birth: |
1941 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Blown Glass |
| Medium: |
Glass |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Blown Glass
Painter
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Biography
Dale Chihuly was born September 20th 1941,in Tacoma, Washington,United States.Dale Chihuly has almost single-handedly turned the craft of glass blowing into an art form in America, moving far beyond the common vision of glass to create glass sculpture in a multitude of forms, colors, and sizes. Transferring the European studio tradition to his native Washington state, the artist is known for his series of sculptural glass works, including Baskets, Persians, Seaform,Macchia,Floats,Ikebana,and Venetians, inspired in part or in whole by natural forms or classical styles. The artist is best recognized for his huge installations of organically shaped Chandeliers, some weighing up to almost a ton. His work has been shown around the world. His 1995 exhibition in Venice placed 2,800 handblown pieces over the canals, bridges, and piazzas of that glass-blowing capital. An installation at the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem in 2000 drew a million visitors.Chihuly has not only revolutionized the status of glassblowing in the United States and abroad, he has also become a major business, employing over 130 engineers, lighting experts, glassblowers, installers, and sales representatives, and selling hundreds of glass sculptures annually. With his work in nearly 200 collections--including venues as disparate as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, a Las Vegas casino, a Disney cruise ship, even in shopping malls and owned by personalities such as ex president Bill Clinton, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and the singer Elton John, Chihuly has more than arrived in the art world. He has created his own artistic universe. In exploring the sculptural potential of glass, declared HG writer Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, Chihuly "has confounded expectations, shattered boundaries, and expanded the scale and uses of art glass with fanciful techniques, historical references, aggressive shapes.
Washington State Upbringing.All this is a long way from Chihuly's roots. Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1941, Chihuly is the son of George, a butcher as well as a union organizer, and of Viola, a homemaker and avid gardener. A blend of Hungarian, Czech, and Slavic on his father's side, and Swedish and Norwegian on his mother's, Chihuly went through school in Tacoma. He lost his only sibling in 1957, when his older brother was killed in a Navy Air Force training accident in Florida. The following year, his father died of a heart attack, and his mother went to work as a bartender to help support her family. Chihuly has described himself as a reckless teenager, but that did not stop him from graduating from high school in Tacoma in 1959 and then enrolling in the College of Puget Sound now the University of Puget Sound.
At college, Chihuly found inspiration in a term paper on Van Gogh and in the act of remodeling his mother's recreation room. He decided to transfer to the University of Washington and major in interior design and architecture. Disillusionment with academia soon set in, however, and selling the car his late brother had left him, Chihuly left college and financed a trip to Europe. His plans were to study art in Florence, a prospect not helped by his ignorance of Italian. From Italy Chihuly moved on to Paris and later Israel, where he worked on a kibbutz in the Negev Desert. During his travels in the Middle East, he met the architect Robert Landsman, and together they visited the ancient site of Petra.
After his year abroad, Chihuly returned to the United States with refocused ambition, re-entering the University of Washington in its College of Arts and Sciences, where he studied under Hope Foote and Warren Hill. During the following years of study, he first began working with glass, incorporating glass shards into woven tapestries. More travels to Europe in 1964 introduced the budding artist to both Leningrad now St. Petersburg and Ireland. Graduating with a B.A. in Interior Design in 1965, Chihuly took work as an interior designer for a Seattle architectural firm. However, soon this work paled, overshadowed by a new interest in glassblowing.After deciding to enter a glassblowing program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Chihuly first worked as a commercial fisherman in Alaska to earn money for school. His instructor at Madison, Harvey Littleton, was an early pioneer in turning glass into more unique, sculptural works of art. In 1967 Chihuly earned a master's in sculpture from the University of Wisconsin, and thereafter enrolled in the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design where he began a real exploration of environmental works employing neon, argon, and blown glass. There he encountered James Carpenter, an installation artist, and the two collaborated on several large-scale projects involving glass, steel, and neon. After graduating with an M.F.A. in 1968, Chihuly next journeyed to Italy on a Fulbright fellowship. There, on the island of Murano outside of Venice, he worked with established masters of the craft whose glassblowing legacy stretched back thirteen centuries. After teaching for a summer in Maine, Chihuly accepted a position at RISD in the sculpture department. He founded the school's glassmaking department and remained on its faculty until 1980. On one visit back home, Chihuly encountered a pair of Seattle area arts patrons, John and Anne Gould Hauberg. They proposed cofounding a glassblowing studio on some of their property overlooking a nearby lake. With the help of a team of other artists from RISD, Chihuly formed the Pilchuck School of Glass in 1971. They built some of the school's first structures themselves. The Pilchuck School attracts students and artisans from around the world, some of whom stay on to join Chihuly's team.
In the early 1970s, Chihuly concentrated on a series of what he called Navajo Blanket Cylinders, working in collaboration with his team at Pilchuck to create glass that simulated the flow and folding of hand-woven blankets. However, in 1976, the artist suffered an automobile accident while on a visit to England that left him sightless in his left eye and with impaired movement in his right foot. The resulting lack of depth perception made it difficult for Chihuly to continue blowing glass himself, and when he dislocated a shoulder in 1979 in a surfing accident, his days of blowing were over for good. Thereafter, Chihuly's team would work from his sketches and under his direction. The artist was always more interested in the product than in glassblowing itself. This is the way artists like Michelangelo worked.
Chihuly's star began to rise in 1977 with a series of Basket glass works inspired by the baskets woven by Northwest Coast Indians. By 1980 he was able to leave the RISD and concentrate solely on his art. Thereafter followed the Seaform series, and commissions for glass and architectural installations began coming his way from pubic and private entities. Other series designs, including Macchia, Soft Cylinder, Persian,Venetian, and Ikebana, followed in the next decade. As Chihuly's fame continued to grow and prices for his art increased, he also kept a hectic schedule of travel and promotion. He purchased buildings in downtown Seattle and transformed them into a glassblowing headquarters. With his 1991 Niijima Float series, inspired by the glass floats Japanese fishermen once used to keep their nets afloat, Chihuly and his team attempted some of the largest pieces of glass ever blown manually.In 1992 Chihuly began his Chandelier series of hanging glass sculpture, huge if not monumental in size and effect. His renown continued to grow with installations across America and around the world, culminating in the Chihuly over Venice"installation of fourteen of his own Chandeliers at various sites in Venice as well as thousands of others designed in collaboration with blowers and designers around the world. Other Chandeliers found their way into sites from the Smithsonian to the Bellagio Resort lobby in Las Vegas. In the year 2000, Chihuly mounted perhaps his most ambitious exhibition to date, Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem, with seventeen installations inside the walls of the ancient military fortress now known as the Tower of David Museum. With that exhibition, Chihuly paid tribute to the ancient art of glassblowing with over ten thousand pieces of multi colored and multi dimensional glass. That same year, Chihuly was also asked to design a millennium installation for the U.S. White House.
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Samples of Work
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