Art Glass Guild explores the seductive beauty and flow of art glass

By Ann Jarmusch

Wander around Spanish Village’s art displays in Balboa Park and eventually you’ll find sparkling Studio 25. It’s the cheerful, colorful home of the Art Glass Guild, where natural light pours into skylights to illuminate the gleaming works of 35 members.
Energy flows here. Color and curves entrance the eye.
“I’ve always found glass to be really seductive. It’s so beautiful and it can be so many things,” said Gail Pulkrabek, guild chairman for 11 years. “It flows. There’s movement to it when it’s molten and you’re manipulating it. Even when it cools, you can see the motion.”
Still more glittering glass is on display Oct. 31-Nov. 15 in “Waves of Glass,” the 28th annual juried show of the guild’s larger sister organization, the Art Glass Association of Southern California. The exhibition, which includes functional, wearable and decorative works in a variety of techniques, occupies Spanish Village’s Studio 21.
No wonder glassmaking is a mesmerizing art form. Its natural origins are mysterious: Lightning? Camp fire leavings? Volcanic eruption? Probably all of the above. People stumbled onto glassmaking around 3,000 B.C., during the Bronze Age. At the beginning of the Roman Empire, glass vessels were considered luxuries, then came into widespread use. By the Middle Ages, lead “strings” made it possible to affix glass pieces to window openings and Venetian glassblowers were threatened with death if they revealed trade secrets. In the Space Age, NASA contributed the science behind dichroic glass, coveted for its otherworldly sparkle.
“Every generation adds to the path,” said Pulkrabek. “I think (the invention of the coating that makes dichroic glass) really revived the public’s interest in glass. It’s just so pretty.”
Pulkrabek, who is also president of the Art Glass Association, recalls being entranced at age 4 by the amazing transformations occurring in glass furnaces she visited with her father. While the molding process she witnessed then seemed magical, she now knows that when glass meets fire exact science is imperative.
“I liken it to cake batter,” she said, referring to varying rates of expansion and specific effects of heating and cooling glass. “You don’t mix carrot cake and pound cake ingredients and expect them to bake under the same conditions.”
A “magical dance of selectively heating and cooling the glass” is how Lea de Wit describes her artistic life in front of a furnace blazing heat at 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. “The experience of working with a medium that can be molten in one state and breakable in another is fascinating,” she writes on her Web site: www.luckystripe.com.
She’s interested in the repetition of patterns in nature and the play of light on surfaces, especially water. A seven-year-old came up with the name “Dragon Scale” for one of de Wit’s  mottled patterns in glass. Pieces in the Dragon Scale series have a watery look (or is it cellular?) and hint at the way “light dances across the bottom” of shallow water along the coastline. In some of her vessels, ribbons of color seem to float to the top, like sea grasses.
De Wit, who studied with Italian glass masters in Italy and others in this country at the Corning Museum of Glass Studio and Haystack Mountain School of Arts and Crafts, works with homeowners, interior designers and architects on custom pieces. She’s also known for imaginative sculptural installations in commercial settings, including a cake display that moved. This month she’s installing glass rondelles in 24 luminous niches at a corporate headquarters in Temecula.
Ivan Adaniya, who favors classical shapes for his vases, has been blowing glass since 1985 when he was a student at the University of Hawaii. He continued his studies at Palomar College, a regional center for glassmaking. Using tongs, he has coaxed molten glass into the shape of a starfish more than 2,000 times and in a rainbow of colors. He also creates life-size birds and flowers, both simplified to their essential shapes and shot with color.
At the Glass Art Guild’s Patio Sale in October, Adaniya’s standouts were a lone iridescent vase, a small beauty with the sheen of a pearl, and one stunning glass pumpkin. Unlike most other pumpkins offered at the sale, this one was opaque and hauntingly black. Its glass stem curled as naturally as can be into the air. “A glass form needs life,” he explained. “When something is reaching up into the sky, you feel that energy.”
Stained-glass artist Gary Mercurio contains the energy and flow of his pictorial and geometric panels and windows within the confines of lead canes, but that doesn’t mean he’s restricted. His favorite period, in fact, is the curvaceous Art Nouveau.
P.J. Horn, who made stained-glass windows for an entire Craftsman bungalow in North Park, showed her 30-year mastery of stained-glass technique in a round medallion featuring a Celtic knot and a weathervane with a stained-glass hummingbird and flower.
Another artist who sometimes looks to the past for inspiration is Patricia G. Yockey (www.yockeyglass.com), a veteran glassblower for 15 years. Among other things, she makes hanging vases in a shape reminiscent of ancient amphoras.  These large vessels have a narrow neck, two flat sides and a pair of handles. “Most people buy them to use as a flask,” she said, although they looked handsome in the garden setting where Yockey had hung several from shepherd’s crooks. If asked, she’ll provide the metal crook and maybe a custom stopper, too.
Guild members aim to please. They demonstrate their craft (minus the fiery furnace for safety reasons) and teach classes at Studio 25. They keep their gallery prices low and offer white gift boxes in exacting sizes. And once a year, each one donates a piece of his or her work to benefit another nonprofit organization.
“More than any other community of artists that I know of glass artists really want to share their passion,” said Pulkrabek.
De Wit, for one, hopes viewers are “drawn into” her swirling “Dragon Scale” work and want “to look at it, touch it, own it, look at it every day… I’m doing something that’s making people’s lives better in a small way.  I’m making a connection with other people.”

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“Waves of Glass,” Oct. 31-Nov. 15, Spanish Village Art Center Studio 21, 1770 Village Place (off Park Blvd.), Balboa Park. Open daily 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Free. Artists reception Nov. 6, 6  to 9 p.m.  Ongoing Art Glass Guild exhibition and sales gallery in Studio 25. For more information, call (619) 702-8006 or visit www.agasc.org.