Chihuly art riots with color, form
Avisit to Grandma’s house had a different twist when I was a kid. My mother’s mother (Gommy to us), tried to fend off our hooliganism by sitting us down with her large leather-bound art book and explaining the virtues of each Renaissance artist.
It worked, in a way. I grew up to believe that art is an important reflection of the society that produces it. Not only do the media used in art suggest something of the circumstances of the artist, but also the reason they produced the work of art.
My husband, Jeff, likes to arrive (inordinately) early for most events. So I found myself wandering downtownOklahoma Cityone day, waiting for the theater to open for a traveling Broadway musical. The nearby art museum was closing, but there in the window, two stories high, was a structure made all of glass. The intense oranges and yellows stunned me. I stopped in my tracks. “What is THAT?” I wondered.
The identifying plate visible through the window of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art informed me that it was art glass by Dale Chihuly. I stood staring at it, conjuring visions of fantastical underwater gardens and magical lands. It was not only beautiful, but interesting and original. I wondered how it was structured, assuming its mass to be too great to be self-supporting.
Alas, Gommy would have been disappointed in me. Though I remembered gawking at the giant glass sculpture, until I found the Chihuly Art Glass museum and garden on the Seattle CityPass, I had not thought to investigate further.
It turns out that Chihuly is the granddaddy of a new art form. Though glass blowers and glaziers have been creating beautiful windows and objects of utility and beauty for millennia, symmetry was always the standard measure of value. Chihuly changed all that.
A native of Tacoma, Washington, Chihuly studied interior design in college. He first began to innovate with glass when he began interweaving shards of stained glass into textile weaving classes. His early art glass was heavily influenced by Native American weaving patterns.
When I saw that first Chihuly pillar, I loved it for the way it made me feel. It reminded me of happy memories of snorkeling and finger painting. It struck me as an uninhibited expression of joy.
Chihuly says of his art, “I want people to be overwhelmed with light and color in some way that they’ve never experienced.”
As I gawked my way through the Seattle Chihuly museum immediately adjacent to the Space Needle, I felt like I had entered a wonderland. The various displays indoors are mostly presented in dark rooms with the art glass backlit. There are glass gardens like a Gurney’s catalog on steroids. There are undersea installations where the undulating glass suggests the drawing board of Earth’s creation. Some displays are on the floor, others are at eye level and an entire gallery displays the art overhead.
Visitors move from the indoors to the outdoor gardens. The forms are vaguely reminiscent of Dr. Seuss. Though I felt like I should wear the intellectual smirk of an art aficionado, I found myself first grinning and then laughing as I moved from one area to the next.
With Chihuly, there are no rules, but only the laws of nature. Nature is seldom symmetrical, and so neither are Chihuly glass creations. He says that he creates art with the vision of how and where it will be viewed in mind.
A quick wander through the inevitable gift shop suggested that any art glass I purchased would not be created by Chihuly. We found a delightful art glass studio downtown the next day and bought a brilliant yellow Christmas ornament that reminded me of Chihuly’s colors for a small fraction of the cost.
On eBay, the least expensive genuine Chihuly you can buy is an 8” Chihuly vase/art piece for a mere $5,500.
I wonder what my ladylike Gommy would have thought of this American artist. She took up oil painting in her 60s and became a proficient copier. But I never saw any sign of unconventional joyful creativity. I may be promoting hooliganism when I show my own grandkids Chihuly art glass, but I want them to enjoy it anyway. He’s part of our American heritage.
Only in America. God bless it.