There is something uplifting about watching creative artists like sculptors and painters at work. How they take raw materials that have no shape or beauty of their own and then use them to bring to reality the vision that existed just in their minds, is something that fills me with wonder. Just take a look at this piece of art where every single part of it is made entirely out of blown glass.
The work is often painstakingly slow and tortured, requiring huge amounts of patience and skill and seeing how they do it, rather than taking away from my sense of awe, just adds to it. I am not an art collector but if I were and had the money, this is the kind of thing I would buy.
The above is the work of Paul Stankard and in this video you see him and his assistants go through the process of creating one piece while also talking about what attracted him to this field of creativity and gave him, an undiagnosed dyslexic who failed in school, a great sense of meaning and purpose in life.
The next time you’re in Boston/Cambridge, be sure to check out Harvard’s glass flowers collection at its natural history museum.
That is amazing!!
I saw a glass artist who made little worlds, complete with weather and terrain features; they were quite amazing. It’s incredibly cool to see how they make their stuff, too. The one I was watching had developed a whole series of tricks for making various features as smaller elements that they then gathered onto the main surface. I suspect the floral arrangements are done similarly; a friend of mine who is a glass artist explained that a lot of the process revolves around making elements out of glass that melts at one temperature or another, then assembling them at a lower temperature. In many ways that’s the same process a jeweller will go through -- soldering with materials that will resist melting when the next step is soldered on, welding before soldering, etc. It’s much more technical than I expected.
That made me very happy! My smile just kept growing.
Technically, that’s not glassblowing. It’s lampworking.
Blaschka glass models
Blaschka marine invertebrates