see the dale chihuly telegraph magazine article here

WILLI AM ANTHONY
D
ale Chihuly likes to do things on a grand scale. Take the Boathouse,
his headquarters on the shore of Lake Union in Seattle. For entertaining he uses a long, narrow room facing the lake, dominated
by a spectacular 87ft dining table carved from a single piece of
polished Douglas fir. Windows on one side offer views out over the water,
and the opposite wall is decorated with a row of Chihuly’s framed paintings
and drawings, with a high shelf above displaying his vast collection of
grotesque carnival masks.
But none of this is what you notice first. The room is dominated by the line
of eight extravagant chandeliers hanging above the table, each in a different
colour of glass and made up of some 130 tentacles and gourd-like shapes that
were hand-blown in the workshop at the Boathouse, but look strangely
organic as they hang here, glittering in the sunlight.
Chihuly is the world’s foremost glass artist, and even if you don’t know
his name, you’ll probably recognise his work. He made the magnificent 30ft
chandelier that hangs in the lobby of the V&A museum in London and the
glass flame that stood in Park Lane during the Olympic year, and he installed
work all over Kew for his Gardens of Glass exhibition in 2005. He has had big
outdoor installations all over the world, and his museum and gallery exhibitions tend to draw record crowds because his work is accessible and colourful
and has an undeniable wow factor.
‘Wow’ is a word I find myself using a lot as I walk around the Boathouse,
which Chihuly bought in 1990 and which served for a while as his family
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Dale Chihuly elevated glass-blowing to an art form
and his show-stopping sculptures cast light and colour
around the world, from the V&A in London to
the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Sheryl Garratt ventures into
the heart of his multimillion-dollar empire
The glass
menagerie
Above Dale Chihuly with one of his team in his workshop at the
Boathouse on Lake Union, Seattle. Chihuly designs his
sculptures and oversees their construction, but he rarely blows
glass since losing an eye in 1976. Left an example of Chihuly’s
Persians series in a ceiling at the Boathouse
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home as well as being his workshop. There is
a swimming pool here with another large chandelier hanging above it and a reef of shell-like
glass works shimmering in the water. A smaller
room nearby has a wall of tanks featuring
unearthly neon-lit glass pieces with large tropical fish swimming around them. (The room was
originally created for his son Jackson, now 15,
who apparently didn’t like it as a child.) A hallway has an illuminated clear glass ceiling showcasing more of Chihuly’s sea-form works and
the flower-like series he calls Persians – an idea
he used to great effect in his biggest work to
date, covering 2,100 sq ft of reinforced glass
ceiling with 2,000 separate hand-blown glass
pieces to create a show-stopping entrance to the
Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.
But most impressive of all is the hot shop
where all of his glass is blown. This is highly
skilled work, but also very physical: the heat
from the furnace is intense, and the lumps of
molten glass being handled on the end of the
blowing pipes can weigh 40lb or more. It’s more
than one man alone can handle, so Chihuly
works with a team of up to 12 craftsmen. The
team move around each other with quiet efficiency, a choreographed dance that is all about
helping the gaffer – today, Joey DeCamp, who
has worked with Chihuly for nearly 20 years – as
he heats and shapes the glass. They hold open
the furnace doors when he needs to heat up the
glass, and add a lip of different coloured molten
glass to the flower-like shape he is creating.
Chihuly comes along and can’t help but get
involved, thwacking the glass with wooden
paddles to add to its curves until finally the
loader pulls on a heavy protective suit and carefully moves the finished piece into the annealing ovens to cool at a controlled temperature.
Some critics are sniffy about his work. It is not a debate Chihuly himself
engages in. ‘Is it art or is it craft? I say if it’s good, it’s an art’
A
Sapphire Neon Tumbleweeds (2013, above) and Cerulean Cobalt Chandelier (2013, below) will be among the
work on show at the exhibition Dale Chihuly: Beyond the Object at the Halcyon Gallery in London
ged 72, Dale Chihuly is a large, affable
man with a fine head of unruly curls and
a black patch over one eye that gives him
a rakish, piratical air. (He lost the sight of his
left eye in 1976 while on a short research trip to
Britain, when he went through the windscreen
in a head-on car collision that left his face so
badly cut he needed 256 stitches and extensive
plastic surgery.) He clearly loves his work, and
still comes into the studio at weekends to draw
or paint, as well as having regular meetings
with his team in the hot shop, overseeing the
forms they produce for his sculptures. The
ambition and scale of his work have helped to
move an artisan craft into the realms of fine art,
and he now heads a series of companies with
a multimillion-dollar turnover.
His beginnings, however, were humble. Born
in 1941 in Tacoma, 30 miles south of Seattle,
he was the younger of two boys. His father was
a butcher and union organiser, and they lived
in a tough working-class neighbourhood. His
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brother, George, joined the US Navy as a pilot
and was killed in a flight-training accident in
1957, when Dale was 15. A year later, their father
died of a heart attack. He was 51. This double
trauma made Dale very close to his mother,
Violet, who died in 2006 at the age of 98, but it
also meant he lacked discipline. ‘I ran around
with a rough crowd, and none of us were concerned with school,’ he explains in his gravelly
West Coast drawl. ‘Fortunately, I didn’t get
kicked out, and then when I graduated, my
mother wanted me to go to college. I didn’t want
to go, but I didn’t want to say no to my mother,
who didn’t ask for a whole lot.’
He enrolled at the University of Puget Sound
in Tacoma because it was close to home and – for
reasons he still can’t explain – decided to take
a weaving course. The same year he redecorated
his mother’s basement, giving it a bohemian coffee house feel, and enjoyed it so much he transferred to Seattle and majored in interior design.
But again he didn’t apply himself, instead joining a fraternity and spending more time drinking than studying. Eventually he dropped out,
choosing instead to spend what little money
he had travelling. He spent several months in
Europe and the Middle East, and ended up working on a kibbutz in Israel, where he met a man
who was to turn his life around. ‘There was
a guy that drove me around a lot and went on
guard duty at night,’ Chihuly says. ‘He had an
Uzi machine gun in his lap the whole time, and
I was just enamoured with him. He was like
a father figure to me, although he was the same
age. It got me thinking about my own life, and
I became determined to go back to school and
do a good job. Which I did.’
After graduating, he found work as a designer
in an architect’s practice but continued weaving,
creating tapestries with glass parts designed to
hang in windows. ‘I got a little oven in this studio
in somebody’s basement, and I started fusing
glass and melting it so I could make things that
would fit into the tapestry. One night I melted
some glass between four bricks, and I took a
piece of pipe – not a blowpipe, just a piece of pipe
that you’d get at the hardware store – and I gathered up some glass and blew a bubble. And from
that moment on, I wanted to be a glass-blower.’
WILLI AM ANTHONY
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here was only one course teaching glassblowing in the US in the late 1960s, at the
University of Wisconsin. In order to pay
for his studies, Chihuly quit his relatively lowpaid design job and worked instead as a commercial fisherman, part of the fleet that still
sails up to Alaska from its base in Seattle. ‘I was
on a 62ft wooden boat,’ he recalls. ‘It had no
lifeboat – when you’re in the cold water you only
have a few minutes to live if you don’t have a
survival suit. It was dangerous but I didn’t know
any better. They don’t allow them to do that any
more. But I made $2,200 within seven months,
which was enough to go to graduate school.’
He spent a year in Wisconsin, then another
year at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
before travelling to Venice on a Fulbright scholarship to study glass-blowing methods there.
He returned to RISD to set up and run a glass
In the intense heat of the workshop Chihuly’s team move around
each other with quiet efficiency, a choreographed dance
Above the hot shop at the Boathouse. The work here is highly skilled and very physical – the artists
work with lumps of molten glass weighing up to 40lb. Below Amber Jade Herons (2013)
course, and in 1971 also helped establish the
Pilchuck Glass School in the foothills of the
Cascade Mountains, an hour north of Seattle.
Teaching was the only way he could imagine
making a living out of blowing glass. ‘There
weren’t very many galleries and hardly anybody
made a living off their art at that time – just a few
people in New York,’ he says.
But slowly his work got noticed. Towards the
end of the 1970s the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York bought three of his cylinders
inspired by the colours and patterns of Navajo
blankets for nearly £2,000. ‘That meant a lot
to me.’ By 1980 his sales added up to the same
amount as his teaching salary, so he felt able to
leave RISD and move back to Seattle, where he
taught part-time at Pilchuck and made glasswork whenever he could. Even then it took
a team of 10 to produce his work, so he would
make what he could then sell it via galleries
until he could afford to hire help to make more.
‘I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t have a
studio, so I would work a few weeks here, a few
weeks there,’ he says.
Gradually he saved enough to put down
a deposit on a small studio, then to hire full-time
staff. In 1990 he moved to the Boathouse, and a
few years after that he bought further buildings
in Seattle and in Tacoma. As his reputation grew,
so did that of Pilchuck, which continues to teach
some 500 students from all around the world on
its renowned summer school. Many choose to
stay on afterwards, and as a result the area is
now home to hundreds of artists and craftsmen
working with glass, a fact celebrated since 2002
by the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, which has
a pedestrian walkway – the Bridge of Light –
adorned with Chihuly sculptures. His work has
become so synonymous with the area that in the
1990s sitcom Frasier, which was set in Seattle,
the pretentious psychiatrist Frasier Crane had
a Chihuly piece on display beside his fireplace.
In 2012 the artist was honoured with a large
permanent exhibition, Chihuly Garden and
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Glass, near the foot of the Seattle Space Needle.
Some critics are sniffy about Chihuly’s work,
saying there are no big ideas behind it, that it
repeats the same motifs and shapes again and
again, that it is craft rather than art. It is not
a debate Chihuly himself engages in. ‘I don’t
even answer that, usually,’ he says. ‘Is it art or
is it craft? I say if it’s good, it’s an art. The best
of everything is an art.’
What is clear, as I tour the different outposts
of his empire, is that Chihuly is big business,
and one run with sleek efficiency. As well as
organising numerous exhibitions worldwide,
he publishes his own coffee table books and
catalogues, some of which are so lavish he says
they will barely break even – ‘But I like books!’
He also employs a full-time videographer, and
produces documentaries on his work that
appear regularly on television in the States.
His large installations now sell for millions
of dollars – a 43ft-tall piece at the Children’s
Museum of Indianapolis, for instance, cost
$4.5 million in 2006 – but there is a price point
for everyone, from the T-shirts, cards and
Chihuly-brand coffee in the Garden and Glass
gift shop to the editions made in his workshop:
smaller glassworks produced in series and
priced from $3,500 to $10,000 depending on
their complexity and how many were made.
Chihuly tells me he did five exhibitions and
about 30 major installations last year, and if the
Boathouse is where the glass forms are created,
his buildings three miles up the road are now
the real heart of the operation. Here the pieces
are assembled into finished sculptures in three
studios, with carpenters on hand to create a toscale indication of the space where the finished
piece will be displayed. Sometimes the studio
walls will even be painted so that clients can see
how the piece will look in situ.
Chihuly takes pride in customer service,
making employees available to unpack and
build the works, and clean, alter or move them
later. Once, he made a 19ft chandelier that went
all the way to the floor around a grand piano in
a New York penthouse. ‘Then the guy died, and
the sister and his business partner both wanted
the chandelier. So we cut it in two, and gave
them each a half.’
He seems surprisingly flexible about the finished form his work takes, and tells me a story
about installing one of his towers in the White
House for the Millennium celebrations. Hillary
Clinton walked by, and stopped for a chat.
‘She said, “Dale, do you number the pieces to
know where they go?” ’ He chortles. ‘And I said,
“Hillary, do I look like the type of guy that would
number the pieces?” ’
ANDRE A JONES V&A IMAGES
T
his month many of his mock-up team will
be in London, where they will spend seven
days installing a 1,500-piece chandelier
in Harrods, and also putting together a show at
the Halcyon Gallery of his greatest hits – a glass
ceiling, six spectacular new chandeliers, big
additions to his Persian series – alongside new
ideas such as neon pieces. The introduction in
the catalogue has been written by Sir Paul
Smith, who became a friend after Chihuly
Chihuly’s large installations now sell for millions of dollars; smaller
glassworks produced in series are priced from $3,500 to $10,000
Above Chihuly’s Gardens of Glass exhibition at Kew in 2005 attracted 860,000 visitors. Below it took a team
of six five days to attach all the glass elements of the Rotunda Chandelier at the V&A in 2001
chanced upon his Covent Garden shop a couple
of years ago. They share a love of collecting and
a distrust of 21st-century technology. ‘One of the
things I like about him is that he corresponds
through the post,’ Chihuly says. ‘And not many
people use the post any more. I use it partly
because I like postage stamps, and I collect
them. Then I use them on my letters.’
Smith’s eclectic collections tend to sit around
his office in drifts, there for inspiration and fun.
Chihuly’s are put on display in his many buildings, grouped together often in numbers that
are overwhelming. There’s a room in the
Boathouse dedicated to some of the thousands
of brightly patterned woollen Pendleton blankets he owns, for instance, while a strange collection of string dispensers hangs on the wall of
a hallway. ‘I have so many collections I wouldn’t
know where to start,’ he says, laughing, when
I ask him to describe his favourites.
As a child he collected toy soldiers and marbles. Now he collects everything from cars – ‘I
only have four now. I’m trying to keep it down’
– to the plaster of Paris figurines that were once
given out as prizes in fairgrounds, with everything from vintage radios to 1950s ovens in
between. His studio is lined with further eclectic collections; others are stored in warehouses.
Then there’s the Collections Café, a restaurant
affixed to his Gardens and Glass exhibition
where the dining tables have been specially
made to house different collections under glass
panels, and others are displayed on the walls.
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