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PrintBlown Away
Glass artist masters light, color in large pieces
Photography by David Harpe
One of Stephen Rolfe Powell's vessels shows his style of having a bulbous belly and long neck.
When people walk by Center Street Gallery, they’re often pulled inside by multicolored, blown-glass vessels that reflect light like a prism.
The large, pointillist sculptures are blown by Stephen Rolfe Powell, one of the world’s best-known contemporary artists in the glass movement. Gallery owner Elizabeth Kimball says window shoppers are drawn to the color patterns and shapes.
But, with vases fetching $25,000 each, Kimball says she sells only about one piece a year. Now, for a small fraction of that, glass lovers can have a little bit of Powell in their homes with his new coffee-table book, Stephen Rolfe Powell: Glassmaker.
The book includes 250 color photographs of Powell’s artwork, as well as pictures of the physical glass-blowing process. Essays from critics, friends and colleagues accompany the photographs, telling about Powell’s life and art.
“Powell is clearly among modern glass’s most nuanced seekers after the eternally sensual and elusive mysteries of light and color, whose upbeat and energetic pieces have for over two decades bubbled and blustered and popped and erupted in fugues of chromatic suggestion,” writes James Yood, an art history teacher. “Powell is one of those extremely rare individuals, an artist who thinks in hues, who makes the eye dance, and whose work provides globular prismatic bursts and an almost giddy tintinnabulation of tincture.”
Powell began his a career at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, where he received a bachelor of arts in painting and ceramics. He earned a teaching certificate from Birmingham-Southern College and a master of fine arts in ceramics at Louisiana State University.
It was in Louisiana that Powell was first “seduced by glass,” he says.
Powell was drawn to the “heart-stopping” colors, sensuous vessel forms and the drama and athleticism that glass art offered. It was a stark contrast to the patient, solitary labor other mediums require.
In the early 1980s, he began teaching at Centre College, developing a glass program that he continues teaching today.
Powell’s technique employs the use of murrini, tiny bits of handmade glass that give the pieces their color. He first lines up as many as 3,000 murrini. Then, with a hot, clear-glass cylinder held by his blowpipe, Powell rolls over the murrini to pick them up onto the piece.
This is where the process can go awry. In fact, only half of Powell’s pieces are successful.
What follows is a frenetically paced “final blowout,” in which Powell uses tongs, blowtorches and airguns from atop a six-foot tall platform to shape the piece, stretching the murrini from beads to organized globs.
With brilliant colors, bulbous bellies and long necks, the pieces sport names like Peacock Cheeks Johnson, Autumn Jealous Cleavage and Acid Puffy Snoop.
In addition to photographs of the process, vibrant pictures of the finished products show how the murrini’s color refract light. The sweeping pictures are almost as fulfilling as the real thing.
So if a $25,000 glass vase is not in the budget, perhaps picking up the book from Center Street Gallery is. n
Houses with glass
Several art galleries in Jackson exhibit one or more glass artists, who differ vastly in style and price point.
A Horse of a Different Color, 60 E. Broadway
Center Street Gallery, 30 Center St.
Craft Gallery, 50 King St.
Glass Place Gallery, 80 Center St.
Muse Gallery, 62 S. Glenwood Ave.
Shadow Mountain Gallery/A Touch of Class, 10 W. Broadway
Wild Hands, 265 W. Pearl Ave.
RARE Properties, 485 W. Broadway
