Glass for Palm Sunday

Robert Stephan is a glassman born in California but now resident in Western North Carolina--a great place for arts and traditional crafts. The pieces shown below were part of a show at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina Glass 2012 (the pictures snapped with my little pocket Canon.) In graduate school, he worked with Kent Ipsen; earlier he taught himself the basics of how to work with hot glass "with a furnace I constructed out of an old 55-gallon steel drum." His sculptures are in collections at the Corning Museum of Glass, the Mint Museum, the Chrysler Museum, and others.

At the Blue Spiral 1 gallery site, his work is described this way: "Robert Stephan’s glass sculptures illustrate the infinite possibilities that light, transparency, and iridescence can be used to create vivid color and subtle texture. Stephan’s glass encompasses a variety of techniques including the application of high-tech optical filter coatings. These are added to the surfaces and/or interiors of his blown, carved and laminated glass sculptures. The coatings produce color shifts where one color is reflected and another transmitted."

I thought Robert Stephan a good choice for the day because of his stance toward his art. In the catalogue to the show, he describes his goals: "It's my desire to involve the viewer in exploring the interior/exterior design. I see the chromatics and configurations as a reflection of a redeemed creation with its order and vibrant energy, from God who thought it good to give beauty to humanity."

A golden glance--

Robert Stephan, glass detail
North Carolina Glass 2012, WCU

Today I am having lunch with a longtime friend from out of town, going to an 85th birthday party for a vigorous, lively woman, and seeing off my husband and my youngest--they're going to the Grand Canyon while I stay home and do . . . taxes! All my facebook friends have declared this terribly unfair and worse that sharp rocks. Although I do not have to sleep on sharp rocks (yes, I think the sharp rocks still win over taxes), I also do not have to feed and care for 41 Scouts or thereabouts. And maybe the combination wins over taxes. Not sure. They will have a jolly, exciting time.

Instead of a proper post, I leave you with a glimpse. Above you see what I saw when I peeped inside a piece of glass by Robert Stephan at the North Carolina Glass 2012 show at Western Carolina University. Lovely golden complexities that shatter and break inside an outwardly smooth and simple object . . . I love these smaller shows where you can get very close to the art, scrutinize it, take pictures, and wander around and around without being bothered.

Meeting me elsewhere: excerpts from 2012 books (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, The Foliate Head) at Scribd. Thaliad at Phoenicia Publishing. See page tabs above for more on those brand new books, The Throne of Psyche from 2011, and others. See prior post new review and comments.

Abundance, creation, art--

Detail of "Spectral Reflections" by Robert Stephan,
from "North Carolina Glass: In Celebration of 50 Years of Studio Glass in America"
The Fine Art Museum, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina

I've been reading portions of saints Athanasius, Augustine, and Maximus the Confessor--have found much of it interesting, very different from our own day. The early church was a bit too busy with persecution and heresy to focus on art, though Augustine has wonderful things to say about the act of creation by God and about gifts and the perception of the beautiful.

The lovely thing that he says about the nature of creation is that it comes from God's abundance. Once creation exists, it needs--human beings need--to move closer to the fount of things, to "the Fountain of Life" in order to be filled with light and "given perfection, splendour, and bliss." To draw close to the light and fragrance and beauty of the creator is to "cry out in joy, confessing your glory, like a man exultant at a feast." A greater abundance gives rise to our abundance.

And isn't that what we feel about art--the best of our art, if it is not some dreary, tweedling thing of pretension and faux intellection and rejection of beauty--that it comes from a great spill of feeling, a waterfall of light that flashes right through us? Creation is a gift, born in abundance and the desire to make.