Dale Chihuly at the De Young Museum - Continued

This post is a continuation of my previous post touring Dale Chihuly's exhibit at the De Young Museum during the summer of 2008.

My favorite part of the 12,000 square foot installation was the Boat Room, where two wooden boats were placed on highly reflective black glass.

 

One boat was filled with Nijima Floats, inspired by the small Japanese fishing floats Chihuly used to find on the shores of Puget Sound when he was a child. 

The Ikebana Boat, was filled with glass floral forms.

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The Chandelier Room housed Chihuly's iconic designs. 

I'd seen a chandelier in a Barcelona restaurant when I was traveling. There was a chandelier hanging at eye level over each table, because the room had a low ceiling. And it was really beautiful. I loved this idea of hanging a chandelier at eye level. It triggered something that said that now I could make a chandelier, because it doesn't have to be functional.

--Dale Chihuly 

...The parts can be bulbous, long and twisted, short and spiraled, or even frog-toed. Hung together, the many pieces that make up each Chandelier create a unified, though complex, composition.

--Dale Chihuly

Orange Hornet Chandelier was installed in my old loft space in the Railway Building. One great story is that the color was so intense at night, with low voltage light on, we used to get calls because people thought the space was on fire. I always liked that one.

--Tracy Savage, Savage Fine Art, Portland, Oregon






The blue Urchin Chandelier provided a wonderful contrast in texture.

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 The Macchia Forest looked like a prehistoric garden.

I pushed Billy Morris to make Macchia bigger and bigger and bigger. By the time we got done, we were making Macchias about three feet high and three feet wide. At the time, that was the largest glass I'd ever made, and some of the largest glass that had ever been made.

--Dale Chihuly

Pushing the envelope of the medium comes with risk and reward:

It's important that we lose pieces. You get there faster, I think, by losing pieces, because you're pushing yourself and you know how far to come back.

--Dale Chihuly

Yet Chihuly and his team never strayed from their artistry; they didn't create these just for the sake of their grand scale. 

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I have a special affection for this red and black object, showcased on the Venetian Wall, because it looks like three-dimensional calligraphy.

Putti are these little characters, they're male, and they were used in Renaissance and Baroque times, and they were put up in the churches, or in the paintings--they were carved out of wood or made of plaster. And they were meant to make people feel good. And to get people together...and maybe they were a little mischievous. They were just meant to suggest a good time, and they looked good. And they probably made people think about youth and this was a great symbol.

--Dale Chihuly

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I felt like I was on an exotic snorkeling excursion when I walked under the Persian Ceiling 

I caught myself spotting for Putti swimming among the aquatic forms.

Although Chihuly forms are essentially abstract, they seem nature-based. The undulating sides, swirling lips, and progressively spaced stripes suggest they may have been shaped by eddying water or gusts of wind. Though the scalloped edges are in fact stationary, their apparent fluidity hints at potential movement like the swaying of organisms responding to tidal changes. 

--David Bourdon, "Chihuly, Climbing the Wall"
Art in in America, June, 1990



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Mille Fiori  looks like it came directly from Lewis Carroll 's imagination. This grand glass garden rises out of a 12' x 56' reflective platform.

People have asked what inspired me to do the Mille Fiori. It wasn't so much trying to replicate plants as it was a way to work with all the techniques we've learned over the last thirty-five, forty years.

--Dale Chihuly

The idea of the Nijima Floats was not only to make them big, but to use a lot of color in different ways. 

--Dale Chihuly

I have to say that it gives me great satisfaction that I am often able to bring members of the public into a museum, who don't normally go to museums, and that the membership increases. So a new type of person is brought in to see my work, and not only my work, whatever else is inthe museum at that time. 

--Dale Chihuly

I dedicate these two posts to John Edward Buchanan, Jr. whose collaboration with Dale Chihuly brought 400,000 visitors to the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco. He lost is battle with cancer on December 30, 2011.

Update (April 17, 2012): Click here to see how Chihuly repeats many of these components for the exhibit at the Halcyon in London.

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All quotes from: Chihuly, Dale. Chihuly: 365 Days. New York: Abrams, 2008. Print.

Dale Chihuly at the De Young Museum

After I watched "Chihuly: Fire & Light" on PBS last week, I was inspired to dip into my photo archives to find the photos I took during the "Chihuly at the de Young" exhibit in the summer of 2008. 

Director John E. Buchanan Jr. expertly lured Dale Chihuly to come to San Francisco. He leveraged the excitement of the shiny new De Young Museum building and promised an astonishing 12,000 square feet of gallery space to showcase four decades of Chihuly’s illustrious career as a glass artist. The crowning glory was Buchanan’s sweeping gesture of granting full artistic license, which sparked Chihuly and his team of world-class glassblowers to create new pieces for this exhibit. The 400,000 visitors that viewed the show are a testament to the genius of this magical collaboration.

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I still miss the 30-foot saffron neon sculpture that stood proudly in the Pool of Enchantment during the show. It was spectacular during the day and at night.

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Glass Forest #3 is one of the earliest pieces and has not been viewed in the US since 1972 [1]. This installment represents Chihuly’s early experiments with neon. The milk glass gives the appearance that the long tubes are white hot.

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My son’s favorite of the entire collection is Neodymium Reeds on Logs, 2004 with larger-than-life reeds rising dramatically like stalagmites from birch logs. The violet neon continues the soothing cave-like atmosphere. See the full scale of the installation here.

I made the first Reeds in 1995 at the Hackman factory, a small glassblowing shop in Nuutajarvi,k Finland. Unlike other factories, the Hackman facility had very high ceilings, which inspired me to make these elongated forms.[2]

--Dale Chihuly

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Persian Wall, 2008 is a grand installation made especially for the De Young Museum.

The Persians – that’s one of the most difficult series to describe. It started off that they were geometric shapes. I think it was a search for new forms. We worked for a year doing only experimental Persians – at least a thousand or more...

Sometimes the Persians became very Seaform-like...

...or they became very geometric. [2]

          --Dale Chihuly

 See an image of the full wall here. 

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The Tabac Basket Room ’s dark lighting evoked the feeling of stepping into a smoke-filled teepee. Pendleton trade blankets covered one wall...

… and woven Indian baskets and their glass counterparts glowed on the opposite wall.

The center of the room showcased the pieces that retained the same organic palette and feeling...

...yet transcended the original basket shapes.

***

Though he has been creating cylinders for over thirty years, Chihuly hadn’t created any in black until the De Young exhibit.

Drawing inspiration from his extensive trade blanket collection, Chihuly “painted” woven images by fusing glass rods onto the cylindrical forms…

… which appear to glow against the black "canvas" and their bright interiors.

More on this show later.

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[1] San Francisco Sentinel
[2] Chihuly, Dale. Chihuly: 365 Days. New York: Abrams, 2008. Print.

Innovative Quilts at Pacific International Quilt Festival XX

As promised, here are a few of my favorite innovative quilts that competed at the Pacific International Quilt Festival XX last month. With over eight hundred works of textile art showing, it was difficult to choose.

The quilters drew inspiration from boundless sources. Roberta Deluz did not have to go far to let her imagination go wild. She designed It Came from Beneath the Sea as a tribute to her father who instilled a love for classic monster movies in her.

I will never be able to look at the clock of the San Francisco Ferry Building without wondering what might ooze up the tower from the bay below.

I can related to Janet Fogg's Magic in Times Square, her interpretation of her first cab ride in New York City .

Other quilters were inspired from faraway continents. Pat Rollie's thirty years of quilting experience is evidenced in her original design depicting a tender scene from the Serengeti. As I saw this quilt, I longed to go back to Africa and encounter a mother giraffe and her calf once again.

My 85-year-old mother made a small wall quilt for an Indian friend featuring the Taj Mahal...

...and exotic creatures.

Nancy S. Brown deservedly won the best hand workmanship ribbon for her wonderfully composed penguins of South Georgia in Antarctica.

It wasn't until I took a closer look that I noticed that the penguins were navigating between mounds of  elephant seals.

In contrast to the cold of the South Pole, Hilda Koning-Bastiaan chose to depict the warm hues of a blooming desert.



Sherry Reynolds honored her beloved Wyoming with this cowboy quilt. She made five variations of the traditional Wyoming Valley block pattern in the upper right.

In another warm desert scene, Kathleen Malvern of Colorado celebrated the majestic saguaro cactus...

... while Kimberly Buzolich celebrated the Sierra Tiger Lily. I like how she produced the soft-focus feeling of the background with the pools of greens and the swirled quilting.




Pat Durbin used every scrap of  her twenty years of quilting experience to render the larger-than-life interpretation of Begonia Picotee Lace...

,,,  in exquisite detail.

While Pat Durbin zoomed in on her subject, Jo Bauer took a panoramic view in Reflections of  Mt. Shuksan.

Other quilters turned to fine art for inspiration. Megan Farkas mimicked a Japanese woodblock print...

...and Kim Butterworth's Cherry Blossoms reminded me of Van Gogh's almond blossoms.

Ellen Wong embraced abstract art by piecing together strips of commercial fabrics...

...and quilting a grid pattern that gives the work a pleasing uniformity.

Kathleen Collins's fascination with 18th century European court paintings of women in headdresses inspired her to create original paintings on cotton cloth...

... which she then incorporated into a pair of elegant quilts.

Nancy S. Brown had productive year. In addition to the penguin and seal quilt above, she finished this poignant quilt of a grandmother at the San Francisco Zoo.

Sue Anthony found a wonderful way to preserve her grandmother's dress...

... and Giny Dixon showcased her father's silk ties...

... set in wool flannel pinstripe resulting in a true work of art.

Congratulations to all the quilters here. I am inspired by your creativity and sewing artistry.