A Brief History and Analysis of Ukiyo-E Prints - Essay Sample

Introduction

Chihuly is considered the number one creator of contemporary glass, not only in the United States but worldwide. Dale Chihuly was born in 1941 in Tacoma, Washington, and is an artist who makes glass sculptures. Ever since he was young, Chihuly was attracted and fascinated with glass. Chihuly graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle, and studied Interior Design. He completed a Master of Science in Sculpture at the University of Wisconsin and another Master of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1968, after receiving a Fulbright scholarship, he went to work at the Venini glass factory in Murano, Venice. There, he observed the teamwork approach to glass blowing, which is fundamental for his current work. There were many artists who influenced Chihuly's works. Among them was Italo Scanga who was one of his best friends and had a very strong influence on him. There were also other famous artists such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Andy Warhol, Van Gogh, and Jackson Pollock who influenced Chihuly's works. Dale Chihuly observed how the Venetians worked more quickly and the production of their works was more refined as a team. On the other hand, the North American artisans of that time worked alone, severely affecting the quality and scale of their work. As a young professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Chihuly began to refine his notion of teamwork and her band of itinerant glassmakers, also known as gaffers, traveled together, gave workshops and did their work. He became a man with a mission, inspiring people to work with glass through events infused with a lot of energy. Later, along with other artists, he founded the influential school of Pilchuck and directed and coordinated the blowing of glass in candlesticks in factories in Finland, Ireland, and Mexico and then hung them in Italy.

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Two brutal accidents threatened his successful career. In 1976, a car accident caused him to lose his left eye, which prevents him from having a sense of perspective and depth. Three years later, in 1979, practicing bodyboard dislocated a shoulder, which immobilized his arm and prevented him from holding and handling the heavy pipe that is used to blow the pieces of burning glass. But far from stopping, Chihuly reinvented her way of working and her own role. Since then he develops the concept of each of his projects with paint and canvas and then employs a team of artists to make them.

"This allowed me to see my work from another perspective, that of supervisor or director," says the artist.

Chihuly is an artist very close to nature. According to Dale Chihuly himself has confessed, the great inspiration of his works has been the garden of his mother in his native Tacoma, perhaps because of the fascination he felt as a child for the abstract forms offered by nature, gardens or the ocean and its creatures, which together with color and movement are a constant in their installations and environmental works of art.

"A garden is a place of physical and spiritual pleasure that represents the perfect world or paradise," said the artist, who often adds neon and argon among its materials.

Indeed, if something characterizes the work of Chihuly is the constant presence of organic forms and insinuating reproductions of natural spaces, whether they are close to an underwater landscape, a wooded space, or the surface of a lake full of lilies or reeds marine. Thus, following the previous statement, it is easy to understand the motivation that gave life to the emergence of the Conservatory Garfield Park in Chicago, one of the most emblematic spaces that shelter some of the most important Chihuly pieces. In the park, glass pieces intertwine with branches and trunks of living trees, are suspended in the air or float in the water, achieving a perfect mix and naturalness with the flora, ambient light, and architecture of these green areas.

Figure 1. Dale Chihuly Glass sculpture at Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago. Source: Shawna Seto Photography.

Chihuly emphasizes his clear artistic intention is to produce something that has not been done before. What matters to him is to make art, to produce emotion. This is achieved, mainly through the creation of facilities and the intervention of various spaces, such as gardens, buildings, rooms, and urban corners. He is an artist who is interested in the presence of the objects and pieces he creates, and how they modify the space in which they are placed, whether it be a natural landscape, an urban or an architectural one. In his works, there is no religious message, nor the goal of creating art prayer. Its main purpose is to create emotional spaces that invite the individual sensory experience, unique and unrepeatable, as happens with any natural landscape. In this sense, his admiration for nature and the inspiration it receives is remarkable.

Fireworks of Glass Tower and Ceiling

Figure 2. Dale Chihuly Fireworks of Glass Tower and Ceiling at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Source: Children Museum.

The Fireworks of Glass sculpture, also referred to as the Fireworks of Glass Tower and Ceiling is the largest blown glass sculpture even made by Dale Chihuly. It is a 43-foot-tower that hangs from the glass ceiling. The tower is situated at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis in Indiana. The glass sculpture is positioned on a glass base through a ceiling made of the pergola and can be seen when one is in any level of the building's spiraling ramp system.

Figure 3. Dale Chihuly Fireworks of Glass Tower and Ceiling at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Source: Children Museum.

At the base of the sculpture, there is an exhibition showing how the sculpture was made and the materials that were used in making in the sculpture. The fireworks of glass and pergola ceiling are made up of 3,200 pieces of cobalt brown, yellow, and red blow glass while the pergola ceiling is composed of about one thousand six hundred pieces of multicolored glasses. Chihuly designed the shapes in Persians, Putti, and Sea forms, three of his most favorite shapes. The shapes in the ceilings include the horn bale, the Mexican hat, the split leaf, the Gooseneck, and the frog foot.

All the pieces of the Fireworks of Glass Ceiling are inspired by flowers, undersea plants, chandeliers, and different other life forms. These can be observed from the revolving platform that is below the ceiling and from the ramp that takes visitors to the different levels of the museum's gallery. At the base of the sculpture, there are smaller pieces of plastic sculptures which children play with and attempt to create their own sculptures. There is also a computer station where visitors experiment with glassblowing, the station is safer and cooler compared to a real station where glass is melted into different shapes.

The combination of colors, the size, the volume of a single piece can be modified in so many ways to dictate creativity. Likewise, the spaces intervened project sensations as diverse as visitors stop to observe the intervened space. To this is added, that the reflected light and the projected color effect will depend on the zenith moment in which the pieces and their space are appreciated. Chihuly took advantage of the luminous function of the glass. He also understood that the crystalline effect awakens in the spaces, both internal and external, the ambiance effect, that is, the creation of emotional atmospheres.

The DNA tower

Figure 4. Dale Chihuly's DNA Tower in Indiana University School of Medicine Science Building. Source: Wiki Visually.

The DNA tower is a public sculpture situated in the atrium of the Indiana University School of Medicine Science Building. The glass sculpture is made up of more than one thousand glass spheres made of different colors such as green, yellow, blue, and mauve. The tower is 6.2 m tall, has a wooden base with a diameter of 1.6m and the diameter of the tower is 1.4m.

The glass sculpture is an accurate representation of the DNA, which is a blueprint of life.

The more than 1,200 blown-glass globes that make up the sculpture have different weights, shapes, and textures. The globes colored blue, mauve, and green are representative of the four nucleobases in the real DNA, the globes colored yellow represent the phosphate or sugar groups and the base is attached to these yellow globes.

The work of Chihuly seems not only to capture dreams through its glass pieces but also, in turn, awakens in the imagination the possibility of recreating fantastic forms and illusory spaces in the mind of who observes and transits through the elements that make up his artistic work. This quality gives a special attraction to medium and large format works, which can participate in the composition of open spaces or serve as a decorative element in internal areas of buildings and spaces for the meeting. and recreation. The play of polychromy, reflections, figures, and shapes that Chihuly procures with his pieces, always generates a unique and particular setting, an emotional experience that turns the light into color through the glass.

Chihuly has mentioned on different occasions that, had he not been a sculptor, he would have liked to dedicate himself to film direction or architecture. And in this vocation that he expresses, it can be seen that in effect, there is a clear understanding of space and aesthetic knowledge to intervene harmoniously with shapes and colors. By going through the spaces in which Chihuly has intervened with his work, come to the senses and the mind, the idea and the sensation of traveling through scenes of fantastic stories, crossed by enormous sculptures, which at times imply being buildings born of magical thought. His art pieces appear as polysemic elements, sometimes as huge sculptural pieces that are transformed, both by natural light and by artificial lighting. They are also used as limiting spaces, which are part of the cover of these, or can appear as hanging sculptures, and even as elements that might be perceived as stained glass, when it comes to the pieces exhibited in the large stained glass of buildings, whose interior lighting is modified by means of light that impinges through glass or glass pieces. In this way, space intervened, is transformed into multiple aesthetic areas: space, shape, color, lighting, and sensation. An outstanding example of this is found in the Federal Court of the Union Station of Tacoma. In this space, five facilities are located with the work of Chihuly.

Figure 5. Dale Chihuly's The Federal Court of the Union Station of Tacoma. Source: Wescover.

The mural of butterflies stands out, a large window intervened with glass pieces in ocher and orange tones, placed freely, disorderly on the surface of the large window, giving the appearance of enormous flowers or butterflies that crossed naturally through the sky of the Tacoma. In front of it, a huge cluster of shapes, between spherical and oval, of blue glass intervenes in the space to give centrality to a room where the visitor can sit down to rest and enjoy the aesthetics provided by light, figures, and space. At any given time, his works can be considered even more fragile than those of the stained glass windows that are preserved inside the old cathedrals. Although the medieval origin of these enormous polychrome windows met both the architectural and spiritual needs of the faithful visitors, the sensation of monumentality and statism generate the effect of solidity, rather than fragility. In contrast, the lightness projected by many of Chihuly's glass pieces, at times generates the sensation of transience.

Exploiting fire, gravity, breath, and centrifugal force, this accomplished master juggles colors, reflections and organic forms while imagining effects of repetition, accumulation, superposition an...