THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 17, 1995 TAG: 9512160048
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines
THE VENERABLE Penland School of Crafts in Penland, N.C., has fostered many fine glass artists since 1967, when Mark Peiser became the first glass artist in residence at the rural artists' haven.
Peiser is among the 23 glass artists featured at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts' exhibit ``Dancing in a Sea of Light.''
The glass artists represented at the center share an affiliation with Penland. They may have studied or been a resident artist there. Or, they might have set up their own studio in the neighborhood, inspired by the communal ambience.
The show is an updated version of a traveling show organized in 1993 by the Asheville (N.C.) Art Museum, and is entirely derived from the remarkable private collection of Isaac and Sonia Luski.
The Luskis opened their collection to arts center curator Jan Riley, who borrowed portions of the original show, plus more recent pieces and works by six new artists.
The result is a gorgeous holiday exhibition that points up the adventurous techniques combined with personal expressiveness that have marked the studio glass movement. The father of that 33-year-old movement, Harvey Littleton, is honored in that his abstract glass sculpture is awarded a prime spot at the show's entrance.
Littleton's 1983 piece is from his ``topological geometry'' series, marked by concentric overlays of colored glass, finally encased in a thick layer of clear glass. The point of the series is to contrast the machine-perfect color layers with the freer overall shapes.
The exhibit design sends patrons clockwise through the center's galleries. The show roughly affords a chronological encounter with the Penland-based glass scene, from the still-working forefathers to the youngsters on the block. All the participants have impressive national credits, having shown at and been collected by top museums.
The work is whimsical and gutsy, with some pieces satirizing precious notions of glass. Moving from surprising piece to surprising piece, it's easy to begin to take the works for granted.
If glass audiences could only see what the artists go through, they would never see these pieces in the same way again. The glass maker deals with so many time-consuming processes, most of them requiring incredible discipline.
There's nothing delicate about working close to fiery furnaces, and handling buckets of molten glass. Just try manipulating a large blown glass vessel in the short period that it remains hot enough to form.
By now, glass has solid status as a medium suitable for serious sculpture, rather than mere paperweights or vases.
Yes, paperweights and vases can be called art, too, if they are esthetically expressive. And there are numerous examples in the show, such as Paul Stankard's eccentric paperweight that has little green frogmen floating by the plants and moth at the core. It is worth noting that every real-looking element in Stankard's 'weights was handmade of glass, from tiny flowers to insects.
Artists with a Virginia connection are included, among them Kent Ipsen of Richmond, who has taught art glass since 1973 at Virginia Commonwealth University. Alluding to the fiery birth of these works, Ipsen's three 1976 blown and hot worked glass vessels resemble a tumultuous firestorm buried in ice.
Jon Kuhn, formerly a Staunton artist and now based in Winston-Salem, N.C., has changed styles since his Virginia mountain days. In Staunton, he made rough sculptural pieces that resembled sliced geodes. The recent work is icy, crisp and features geometric optical effects.
Kuhn's extraordinary ``Spectral Isolation'' is a large, faceted, clear glass block with a tiny cube of gridded color glass at its core. As the viewer moves around the piece, edges meet the gallery lights, setting off a regular fireworks display of prismatic flashes.
Peiser's ``15698'' is a showstopping landscape encased in a semicircle of glass. Sit through the half-hour documentary video set up nearby, and you'll see how Peiser made his piece. Just watching a summary of the steps is exhausting. The video solves the mystery of the texture on the raggedy base of the piece: It is derived from the original Styrofoam form. Seen through the glass, the texture lends the effect of a rough, rolling landscape.
The range of memorable forms extends from Robert Levin's humorous cast and blown glass banana goblet to Shane Fero's toylike and delicate ``spirit vessels'' to Kate Vogel's and John Littleton's giant colored glass paper bags within paper bags.
Stephen Dee Edwards' huge ``Triple Bird Head'' is an icy blue cast sculpture with a strong totemic presence. Edwards is a former president of the National Glass Art Society, in its 25th year, and teaches glass at Alfred (N.Y.) University.
Another collaborative team, Yaffa Sikorsky-Todd and Jeffrey Todd, create nature forms. In one piece, a form like a flattened goldfish bowl has been ``painted'' with glass to resemble a landscape.
Wrote the Todds: ``We use nature as a springboard to rise beyond the reality of time to freeze, for a moment, something that is beautiful and fleeting.''
Exchange the word ``nature'' for ``glass,'' and you've got the main modus operandi of the artists in ``Sea of Glass.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Richard Ritter's glass bowl is part of the exhibit ``Dancing in a
Sea of Light'' at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts.
by CNB