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PHOTOS COURTESY OF WILLIAM TRAVER GALLERY

VOLCANIC. Glass artist Dale Chihuly often tempers his stunning acrylic drawings with a blow torch.

Chihuly revisits old forms in new Traver exhibit

By Dave R. Davison

Tacoma’s William Traver Gallery has scored a coup in landing a major show by Dale Chihuly, arguably the most famous of the currently living sons of Tacoma, and the single most influential figure in the making of the Puget Sound region into a world renowned center of fine art glass. The show, “Dale Chihuly: Baskets, Cylinders and Drawings,” opened May 10. A reception for the artist will occur May 17 and a wine tasting reception will take place May 31.

“Dale Chihuly: Baskets, Cylinders and Drawings” consists entirely of new work all done within the last two years. There is, however, a hearkening back to an earlier time involved in the main themes of this show. The “Cylinders” and the “Baskets” are two of the first series of works by which young Chihuly began to make a name for himself in the art world.

New walls have been constructed to divide the gallery space into separate display areas for the various series of works that are represented in the show.

Upon entry into the gallery, the first space that one encounters is occupied by a new set of Chihuly’s “Basket” series. The original inspiration for this series occurred on a day in the early 1970s when Chihuly encountered a collection of Northwest Indian baskets in the storeroom of the Tacoma Historical Society. “I was struck by the grace of their slumped, sagging forms,” he asserts. “I wanted to capture this in glass. The breakthrough for me was recognizing that heat and gravity were the tools to be used to make these forms.”

The encounter propelled Chihuly away from symmetrical forms and into the making of the slumped, organic, wrinkled forms that have since become commonplace in the world of art glass. He was also inspired to create forms that could nest inside one another in the same way as the native baskets in their storage room. The “Basket” series was begun in the summer of 1977 and became a hallmark of the Chihuly style.

The “Baskets” in the current show seem almost impossibly thin, like gossamer soap bubbles frozen in time as they warp in a breeze just before bursting. Some are cylindrical, some spherical, some lay almost flat. The element of gravity is captured in the way that they lean and wrinkle.

They are made in bronze, earthy tones with understated accents of Chihuly’s “drawn” lines. Red, brown and orange strands follow the distorted shape of the form. Here and there a metallic accent or a little rectangle of color will appear.

“The Baskets was the first series that I did that really took advantage of the molten properties of the glass blowing process,” Chihuly notes.

Over half of the gallery space is devoted to recently created examples of Chihuly’s “Cylinder” series.

“Cylinders” was originally begun in 1974 when Chihuly and his collaborators were seeking a means to “draw” on glass in a hot process. The solution was to lay out a “drawing” in strands of colored glass and to roll a hot glass cylinder that would “pick up” and incorporate the “drawing.”

All of the “Cylinders” in the show – the Irish Cylinders, the Soft Cylinders, the Clear Cylinders and the Black Cylinders – incorporate this “drawing” element for which Chihuly is famous.

The Clear Cylinders are done in glass that is amazingly thick and heavy. The Black Cylinders and the Soft Cylinders (the latter being a synthesis of the “Baskets” and the “Cylinders”) are all more thinly walled. Their dark exterior, however, brings out the bright color of the “drawing” that is wrapped around their forms.

These drawings generally consist of a loose weave of busy lines that criss-cross in grids and are accented with circles and tiny marks that are cast on like candy sprinkles. Their maidenhair cascades of color flow over brilliant rectangles with domino dots. The busy colors stand stark against the dark exterior. These vessels are equipped with a lip of livid hue and the interior of each is generally a solid color: vivid yellow, orange, cool blue or hard red, for example.

Mounted on walls throughout the gallery are many of Chihuly’s drawings. Primarily acrylic on paper, Chihuly will often add metallic flake to his paints and then temper the composition with a blowtorch. His colors are spectacular – lively reds against gold or sparkling blue planted in a sea of thick silver. His paints are playfully splashed onto the paper. Chihuly is not shy about putting his signature front and center in his drawings where it exists like a segment of Arabic calligraphy. The Chihuly signature becomes an integral element of the whole.

In a space in the back of the gallery is a colorful collection of representatives of many of Chihuly’s other series. This space, something of a medley of Chihuly’s “greatest hits,” is presided over by a great, yellow-green assemblage of tendrils and orbs that dangles from the ceiling.

A similar pair of assemblages – mounted on either side of the gallery’s main doors – is done in elegant colors: smoky purples, golds, blacks and clear glass accented with tiny notes of green. It is these bursts of color and form that bid fond farewell to the gallery visitor whose visit to this show will have been well worthwhile.

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