Dale Chihuly Interview (page: 3 / 6) Master Glass Artist	Print Interview

Did you have a teacher who inspired you in any way?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Dale Chihuly: I don't remember most of my teachers. But I did have a couple that inspired me. Mostly women. One was a home economics teacher that taught weaving. I took this weaving course as a requirement for interior design, and she encouraged us to do something creative as a final project or something, and I put little bits of glass into a tapestry, or into a little weaving. And it turned out okay, and she really thought it was special, and so she encouraged me to continue to weave. Actually, she would even set the loom up for me and stuff, 'cause I never liked doing the labor part of stuff. So I got very interested in this glass and these weavings, and decided I wanted to be able to melt the glass a little bit so it wouldn't be sharp. And then I started weaving little wires, fusing wire between two pieces of glass so I could weave the wire into the weaving. And developed some other techniques so I could put bigger pieces of glass and foam in the loom so that it would work, and I got so interested in this and in the glass that I started being less concerned with the weaving and more concerned with the glass.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One night I melted some glass, 'cause I had a little kiln in my basement. I melted some glass and put a blowpipe in there -- not a blowpipe, I didn't even know what a blowpipe looked like 'cause I had never seen glassblowing, but just a pipe -- and gathered up some glass, took it out, blew a bubble, which was very lucky. And I thought I'd done this miraculous thing by blowing a bubble, 'cause it is pretty exciting to blow human breath down a blowpipe and then have a bubble occur. It's the only thing you can do it with, is glass. But the odd part of it is, it wouldn't be so odd if you went to glassblowing school and did that, or if you went to a factory and did that. But I did that in my basement without ever having seen it. And at that point I decided I wanted to be a glassblower. So by this time, I'm out of school, working as a designer for an architect, and now I want to become a glassblower, so by chance there was a school where you could study glassblowing, it had just started, University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. So I went to Alaska and became a commercial fisherman for six months and earned the money to go to school. And so here I am, I'm going to graduate school, studying glass in an art program, more or less.

My background hadn't really taught me much about art. But I started out by being interested in art, not in craft. I was always making environments or sculptures, without really knowing what I was doing, but there were a lot of people around that helped me, so I had the confidence to do it. And I had the glass on my side, because at this point, hardly anybody was working with glass in the United States. So if people saw a sculpture made out of glass -- some weird form in that way -- they were very interested in it, because they'd never seen it before. So I was lucky there. You might say it was timing. People always talk about the right place at the right time, and that was a factor for me.

You say you first became involved with glass in your college weaving class. Was there already something about the properties of glass that you loved? Had it always attracted you?

Dale Chihuly: I guess so.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I always liked stained glass. But I always say, take a little kid down to the beach, you're walking along the beach, you're picking up shells, rocks, beautiful things, and then there's a little bit of stained glass, a little bit of broken bottle -- blue, cobalt blue, green, some colors sitting there. The little kid is going to go for the glass every time, over the shells, over anything. It's the same thing as a diamond down there, almost. I mean, if you look at the fascination we have for gems, that every culture has had. And glass is almost the same thing, I mean, it almost looks... in some cases it looks better. It's just the light going through this colored material. There are very few transparent materials. Plastic is one of the only other ones, and people don't like plastic very much, unfortunately. I like plastic, and I'd like to work with it more, but people really don't like it. There's no history.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

So I guess you're saying glass has a universal appeal, even for children.

Dale Chihuly: Marbles are made out of glass usually, and they're inexpensive to make, but I wonder why marbles are made out of glass. You could make them out of a lot of different materials, and they did, I think. But glass is really the thing for marbles, and people love marbles. I loved marbles when I was a kid, too. That was probably another interest in glass.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Walk into any cathedral, walk into one of the great cathedrals of Europe, it's got a stained glass window up there. There isn't anybody going to walk in there that doesn't think about that window, comment about the color. Probably remember the window more than anything in the church. And that's the same idea, light through glass. Doesn't take very much, either. You can see a square inch of red 300 feet away. That's all it would take to see this beautiful color. So I guess it's color and form. If you add glassblowing to it, now you can make things very quickly with almost no materials at all. I mean, no tools. The way I work is very fast, and with a lot of natural elements like centrifugal force and gravity and fire, and you're forming this thing, and it's moving, it's alive. And if you're watching it, you're completely mesmerized as well. Not only the person making it, but the person watching it, they can stand there for hours and watch you. And there's something sort of magical about it: the way it's done, what it looks like when it's finished, the way it goes from liquid to solid. Glass is described scientifically as a super-cooled liquid when it's hard. Even that is sort of screwed up. There's just something totally unique about the material and the way it's worked.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

As you grew older and your work with glass started becoming your livelihood, how did your vision grow?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Dale Chihuly: Well first of all, I wanted to be a glassblower, so the easiest way to be a glassblower at that time, in the '60s, would be to be a professor, because then you have access to the glass, the shop, or you might say the laboratory. So I took a job to start a glass department at the Rhode Island School of Design, and for years I would teach, and then blow glass, and I was lucky to be able to sort of build a career while I was a professor. Some people can do that, some people it's too much. So I was able to do that, and although it wasn't until more than ten years after I started that I really sold any glass. And then that was 1976. By 1980, my salary was equal to my teaching salary, so I quit teaching and moved back to Seattle. In the meantime, I had started, with some friends, a school in Seattle. In 1971 we started the Pilchuck Glass School. So Seattle became the center for glass in the country because of this school. We brought people from all over the world. In my own career, I kept forging ahead, trying to work as much as I could, having the energy, the energy is what a lot of it's all about. If you don't have the energy, it's pretty hard. I think artists or creative people probably have more energy than most. So if you have this energy, you sort of want to give it to somebody in some way. So I was able to develop my work and be smart enough to quit teaching when a lot of people in the same circumstances would have tried to do -- continued to do -- both.

When I quit teaching, I had a lot more time, of course.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So I collaborated with a lot of people, with people that were better than me. I collaborated with students. I just wanted to make things. At that time, we didn't care what it was for or who it was for. So I learned a lot from a lot of different people, and I learned to work with a team, and glassblowing is done best as a team. So I got good at directing and working with a team, and that enabled me to do more things. If you needed a bigger project, bigger team. And when I had the money, I would get a facility and hire the people. When I didn't have the money, I'd beg them to help me! Whatever it took to do the work. So slowly, I got, I guess it was about five years after I quit teaching that I could afford to get my own space. I could afford to make a down payment on a $250,000 building, and then a year or two later rent a building and build a $50,000 glass shop or something. And so then I had my own studio and my own shop. And then five years later, I could buy a bigger building and build a bigger shop and have a bigger team. And so now, I have, I don't know, I probably have the biggest studio of just about anybody, in glass or anything else, for that matter. I have a big team of people.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There's a lot of responsibility, and it's a lot of work to have to deal with all those people in terms of day-to-day operation, but on the other hand, it allows me to do... I can do just about anything I want with glass, because I've got the facilities and the team. And what a lot of people don't realize is that the creative process can also be teamwork. They think of creativity, especially of artists, as working alone. And that's only one way. As usual, there are many ways to do things. But yeah, we think of creativity, I don't know why we think of creativity as something you do alone. Obviously if you're going to make a film, you're going to work with a lot of creative people working together. And the same with making art, or making paintings. If you go back to the Renaissance -- Rubens or all those big studios -- ateliers where people worked together. I often find that because I work with a team so much, and try to help get the team working the way I want it, I'm constantly up against people that can't work in a team, that are in the team! They can't delegate the person underneath them to do one part of the operation. And you have to do that, you have to know, you have to have confidence in the people that you're working with that they can do it. Artists want to control things a lot of times.

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