Dale Chihuly Interview (page: 2 / 6) Master Glass Artist	Print Interview

Where did you get this idea? You worked with glass for many years before making any chandelier-like objects. Can you remember how you got this idea?

Dale Chihuly: Actually, I do know how that happened.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was in a restaurant in Barcelona, a little kind of Italian restaurant, and it had some Venetian chandeliers in the restaurant. I walked in and I was looking right at a chandelier, sort of at eye level -- normally they're overhead -- but then when you sat down on the table you could look underneath it and have your meal, and it sort of acted as a centerpiece for the table. I'd thought about chandeliers before, but I didn't want to make a light fixture really. It didn't interest me to make something that was going to look like a light fixture or a decoration. And when I saw that chandelier at eye level, which this restaurateur had figured out would be a nice way to decorate his restaurant, I put that away, that this might work. And then later on, I decided to do a chandelier, and I put it not only at eye level, I put it almost floor-to-ceiling. And I made very simple parts. The parts for the chandeliers -- which sometimes are as many as 3,000 parts -- are just simple blown parts that a beginner could almost make. Then we just wire on some wire on the end, and you hook them onto a steel armature, so you put the first one on and the second. So the whole piece, the chandeliers, could be made by almost anybody, yet nobody had thought about -- except for this restaurateur -- thought about putting a chandelier at eye level.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

Normally when I put them up, I put them up in such a way that they don't really look like chandeliers. They're not lit from inside, they're usually lit from outside. But it was a simple idea that I've been working on now for three or four years. I did one, I really liked it, I started making more. There was a lot of possibilities with the idea once I got started.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. A lot of times when an artist starts an idea, very often people don't like it. Nobody really bought one of these for a couple of years, because they liked my earlier work. A lot of times the artists don't like it either. I remember on a couple of occasions starting a new series of work that I really thought was good, and some of my best friends would pull me aside and kind of tell me that they didn't think that was going to make it. But if you believe in the idea, then you go ahead and do it. At a certain point, maybe you might agree with them after three or four months. You've worked on it and you've developed it, and maybe you let it go. Either let it go or you carry on. For myself, it's usually when I exhibit it for the first time; that usually means I believe in the idea.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Get the Flash Player to see this video. On the same project, the first country I went to, Finland, I went over there -- 'cause I work in a team of people: glassblowers and sculptors, artists -- so 30 of us went over to Finland to work in this little village, and I went over with the intention of making chandeliers for this project, to hang over the canals of Venice. I don't know exactly where that idea came from, hanging them over the canals of Venice. But when I went there with the 30 people, we got an equal amount of people from each country to work with us, so we're working hand in hand with, in this case, with people that we didn't speak the same language. But that wasn't such a problem really. But then there was a river -- this actually reminds me of it, right here -- there was kind of a still river near the factory. I went down to hang a chandelier, for example, off of that limb there, to get the reflection in the river. And when I put the chandelier up there --'cause we were in boats, under a bridge. It was under a bridge -- we actually ended up putting them in a lot of places -- I couldn't help but want to throw the chandelier parts in the river. So we just threw all the chandelier parts in the river and then went downstream and had the Finns pick them up in their boats and hung them up in another spot.

Did they float?

Dale Chihuly: Yeah. They floated down river. And then we discovered that almost everything we put in the river would float, even though they had holes. Big pieces. I often work to a very large scale. I wasn't going to work large-scale in Finland, but once we saw these things would float, we started working bigger and bigger. So the project turned into a project about the river and we did a lot of installations around the river that I had never done before, and every day I would start out not knowing what I wanted to do. And here I had 30, plus 30 more -- 60 people working -- with all this great access to this factory, all this molten glass and great glassblowers, and I'm walking around not sure what I want to do. But it worked out, but that's the way I like to work, for me. I like to take it one day at a time, and just do whatever. If I want to change my mind, I'll change it.

What intrigued you about throwing the glass into the water? What was going through your mind?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Dale Chihuly: We were hanging the chandelier under the bridge in Finland, and so there we are in a boat, hanging the chandelier, and you know if you throw the glass in the water, you know it's going to float, these parts especially, and it's going to go downstream. So I couldn't help but this... you know, put the thing up, and then when we were taking it down, to throw it in the water, to see what it'd look like. And then we started throwing other parts in there, and nothing would sink, and even if it had a big hole in it, it didn't sink. So we started making big parts just to throw in the river. So you'd end up with just a river full of glass, going down with the sun hitting it and the stuff moving down the stream. It was pretty nice.

When did you first know that you wanted to be an artist?

Dale Chihuly: I was a freshman in college and I decorated my mother's basement. I thought I was an interior designer after I did that, even though I don't think anybody told me they liked it. So I decided I'd become an interior designer, and I did.

When you first decided on that career, what was your family's reaction?

Dale Chihuly: Well, it was only my mother, and...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My mother always let me do whatever I wanted. She was totally supportive of anything I wanted to do. In fact it was my mother, although, who encouraged me to go to college. I probably wouldn't have gone to college. She wanted me to go to college, so I did. And when I decided I wanted to be an interior designer, architect, artist, she was always a hundred percent for it. My mother never really pushed me to do things. She didn't push me to be a high achiever. She didn't push me to a profession that she preferred. She let me do exactly what I wanted to do.

What appealed to you about decorating your mom's basement? Did that inspire you?

Dale Chihuly: I don't know.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I wish I could really remember why I decorated the basement. But I started making furniture and picking out colors and getting drapes, all this stuff. It's still that way. It's kind of ugly. I was only 18 then, and it was something I wanted to do, and I really don't know how it came about. It was kind of a strange thing, but it got me going. I transferred schools into interior design, and I was on my way, although I was never a very good student. I could never really apply myself. I wasn't a good student when I was in high school either. So I went to college, and then after a couple of years -- three years -- I saw that I wasn't really doing that well in school. So I dropped out. I went to Europe for a year and traveled around, all around Europe, ended up working on a kibbutz in Israel, and then sort of flipped. When I came back, I was 21 years old, and from that point forward, I was highly motivated. Just flipped.

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