American Blowing Glass Artisans
One of the coolest things about the process of glassblowing is just how primitive blowing glass is. Nothing has really changed in the last thousand years. The craft men behind such art have no book they read that tells them what to do, yet we have many of these craft artisans in many historical books for great designs that we have sorted after and have become most of our gift items.
A whole lot of these artisans need to be recognized for their aesthetic ideas like the glassblowers on the island Murano near Venice, which have gone beyond just spending time with the materials they learn how to manipulate and work with it.
They are almost like cavemen playing with fire and metal tools, but they have been able to enhance the beauty of glass or the people who use it and the decoration of places and people, so we must keep the glass tradition alive.
But as the world is getting more and more focused on computers and technology, this art is getting farther and farther behind.
Post like this will be valuable to invest your reading time on, as we are prepared to give you top glassblowing artisans in America and their handcrafted works.
Give the Perfect Gift
Every single day there is a national day somewhere, pretty sure that it is time to start thinking about what gifts to get your friends and loved ones. If you’re looking for something unique and handmade, why not consider a piece of blown glass art from one of these five amazing American artisans?
Ricard(Rick) Satava
A master glass artisan who first discovered glass blowing in high school is the first on the list. That’s no other person than Richard Satava, a well-known American glass artist who studied Art at California State University, Chico.
He draws his inspiration from what he sees every day around him. Satava finds plenty to inspire his creativity. From his imagination to the landscapes he observes, to the fascinating images he sees from the depth of the sea.
In 1977, he opened his glass workshop, Satava Art Glass, located in Northern California, home to many unimaginable glassware designs. Each of Satava’s pieces is made of a special and one-of-a-kind glass that Satava formulates himself.
The most famous works of Satava are undoubtedly his realistic glass jellyfish sculptures preserved in glass, which customers that highly value glass sculpture both from a private and corporate background sought after very much.
It is also worth noting that Satava’s art was featured in the mass hit TV series “Guardians of the Galaxy,” just as the design of his colleague, Jack Storms, did.
Satava is well known for incorporating centuries-old techniques with modern predilections to create original designs in glass.
Satava’s most unique approach is using a blowpipe to transform hot glass using exclusive color formulas without the use of molds to shape these pieces when blowing the hot glass through the blowpipe. Also, you will find Satava’s designs being signed, dated, and numbered.
Satava’s dazzling colors, coupled with his ability to bring out incredible detail and dimension, bring to life his much sought-after work.
Charlene Foster
Charlene Foster is a Philippine-American glass artist who history tells first discovered glassblowing during classes at Avon Place Glass in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and since then has studied at the Boston Center for Adult Education, Penland School of Arts and Crafts, the prestigious Pilchuck Glass School, and the Corning Museum of Glass in New York before she studied at the University of Alaska.
Since moving to the United States from the Philippines at age ten, glass-blow artisan Charlene Foster has gone all over the country to develop her craft and exhibit the magnificent results we have come to pay tribute to in the post.
Her work and several other pieces of custom jewelry with glass ties have been featured in myriad art-related magazines while most have been auctioned off at The Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, the Urban Glass Blowers’ Ball in New York, and at Wheaton Arts in New Jersey.
Charlene Foster, who is now based in Brooklyn, is ever committed to creating custom and personalized glass jewelry for museums, galleries, and a range of high-end customers for gifts presentation and house decor.
Shayna Leib
Shayna Leib is a multimedia glass artist with 20 years’ experience in the field to-date. She first saw glassblowing when she was seven years old and has since won seven awards to date after she began her glassblowing quest several years ago. In fact, Leib was recently nominated for the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant.
Leib studied Russian literature, glassblowing, and classical piano while completing her Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California.
She chose to incline more to glassblowing and metal works because she believes she can communicate better her intelligence, sense of design, and rhythm.
She has worked with a long list of materials that include ceramic, stone, metal, photography, and fabric, but the glass remains her professional preference for its ability to express flow and movement.
She was recently recognized for her sculptural glasswork titled Current, which won first place in the 2003 Horizon Emerging Artist Award given by the American Craft Museum and Hunter Douglas. The sculpture Current was featured at the International Sculptural Objects Functional Art (SOFA) exhibition in New York City.
It took three months to complete and contains around 40,000 individual glass elements placed by hand. “Current” shows a ceaseless movement with subtle green monotones, giving the piece an organic yet deliberate quality. Her artwork will definitely be one that you’ll cherish to have for the center dining in your house.
Her glass pieces are just very genuine, sensitive, and designed uniquely for all and sundry. The look of her art is natural and subtle, yet her aggressiveness with the glass medium is intensely focused on producing original, colorful, and chromatic works. There is a transformation through the chaos. Her works derive patterns from chaos and possess a self-similarity.
Martin Blank
Martin Blank has a quintessential style of his own as one of North America’s first visual glassblowers. His birth took place on August 29, 1962.
After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1984 with a glass major, Martin Blank was given the opportunity to work with the great Dale Chihuly after completing his BFA. He studied at the Rhode Island School of design. Less than a decade later, while at the Pilchuck Glass Academy, Martin Blanck produced and sold his work independently.
A great deal of Blank’s work celebrates what he calls the “complementary connection between nature’s and imagery in space.” For example, his 15-feet-high and 210-feet long “Fluent Steps” sculpture, located in the Glass Museum in Tacoma, Washington, is a tribute to water in its different embodiments.
The piece consists of 754 individually hand-sculpted glassworks, which required the expertise of a group of more than 40 artists, architects, and engineers to create and install. Blank’s works can be seen at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, Detroit, Nashville, and Seattle.
Blank’s blown glass sculptures are in collections throughout the United States. He is featured in international exhibitions, including the Millennium Museum in Beijing, China, the Shanghai Museum of Fine Art, and the American Embassy in Slovakia.
Karen Lamonte
Not long after the New-york native Karen LaMonte graduated from the Rhode Island school, where she studied pattern and design, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at Eastern Bohemia, in one of the city’s well-renowned glass casting studios.
While there, she established what has become her most famous work, “Vestige,” a cast-glass, life-size sculpture of a dress.
This incredible piece took one year and needed special technology to be developed, introducing the lost wax process to Czech glass casting studios.
LaMonte has been using clothing as a metaphor for “identity and human discovery in absentia,” winning nine worldwide awards among others to her name.
LaMonte’s works have so far appeared at the Museo de Ciencias de Knoxville, the Oklahoma Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Howard Ben Tré
Howard Ben Tre is named a glass blowing specialist by “Glass magazine” in the casting technique of pouring hot glasses, creating small sculptures, and large-scale public works even though he had a rough start to life in glass blowing.
Howard Ben Tre makes fine art castings at her studio in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, by pouring molten glass into sand molds, heating, and cooling for months.
The form is sandblasted, cut, ground, and polished before individual designs, such as the gold leaf, are added. His work has been part of the glass revolution, featuring a timeless and kind pleasure that is normally not synonymous with art.
Tre’s work, ‘Siphon,’ is currently on display at the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York City, and other works are also displayed at the Corning City Glass Museum.
Blowing Glass Arts and Crafts
There are numerous arts and crafts out there, and the art of blowing glass into magnificent sculptures is one of the best gifts of love you can buy. Gifting art is a way to capture beautiful moments, reaching out for lost love. It’s about painting that exquisite moment to whosoever deserves it.
It’s about wishing, reaching out to touch beauty, and searching for perfection in a way that touches the heart. It gives people the experience of standing in front of some unbelievable nature, whether it’s the ocean or a lake, or the dew on a crisp morning.
Can you Feel it?
It’s the quality of being, like the first drop of rain as it hits a secluded pond, the resonance, the way the ripples reach out, crossing each other’s paths, intercepting, spreading, reaching, dividing, overlapping. All these were made real by the beautiful works of artisans out there.
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