Just Another Person Who Thinks She Knows Something
24 December
I remember when this used to hang right outside the entryway to Panorama, the Museum’s restaurant, back in the day. You’d have to go beneath the chandelier to go up to Panorama from the bottom floor, and it was like being bathed in broken, bright light from heaven. The lighting is different now, but it’s still so lovely if you can get just the right day – the light just sings.
This isn’t your typical Tiffany glass vase; it’s not as schooled and elegant, the lines aren’t as crisp and clear, but you can definitely tell it’s from Tiffany as opposed to anyone else. It just has that panache.
It’s small, warped pressed glass that’s somehow survived the ages. How? Who knows!
I do love some old glassware, and this is no exception. The color marbling/frosting is particularly interesting and I think has to do with sudden temperature differentiation in the cooling process – but what do I know? I’m not a glassmaker.
This window is something else and a bottle of pancake syrup, boys and girls. It’s meant to be semi-religious, but it isn’t really doing a very good job of paying homage to the Christian church – it’s far more of a case of secular mocking of the church as applied to the banking world: holding the moneylenders up as God. It’s amusing in its sarcasm.
I’m constantly amazed by the juxtaposition of complexity and simplicity in this piece. On the one hand, the lines are achingly simple – and yet they are unerringly complex in design and execution.
I fucking fangirl frakking puffy heart this glass sculpture like omg whoa. It looks like a block of lousy blue glass but it’s so much more than that. If you get all the way down by the right corner and peer up, you can see through the center open trapezoidal space of the piece (as I tried to do in the second photo and failed miserably because I couldn’t get the angle because of a damn wall in my way). It’s an amazing use of spatial compositional balance, and when the sun streams down in through the glass and catches the bubbles? Bellissimo!
This thing is weird as all hell and looks like a sea anemone gone wrong. Fight me.
Fun fact: my favorite color when I was a child was yellow. Secondary fun fact: when I was a child, I wanted to learn how to blow glass, until I learned just how hot glass was (and considering I couldn’t get a casserole dish out of the oven without burning myself, introducing wee me to the fiery depths of a hellish glass furnace would not have gone well).
Glassware is one of my favorite forms of artwork; in this case, the stark harsh lines are broken up by softer, flowing edges and gentler waves, giving the illusion of motion within the larger framework. The light dances between the angles and planes, refracting and reflecting, creating a gentle dance that is both masculine and feminine, which definitely designates the design as American and probably closer to 1858-1860, as earlier periods were slightly more ornate and bending more toward the effeminate, as toward the European styles.
This might just look like a big hunking chunk of glass, but if you look a little closer, you can see layer upon layer upon layer of copper and glass inside the greater structure. These layers are fused together to create an intimately abstract sculpture that is more than the component parts of the piece, and certainly more than just a piece of glass.