Glass Artist Captivates Gonzaga Crowd

Dale Chihuly lecture Thursday, Nov. 9 Gonzaga University’s Martin Centre

How many artists have this kind of drawing power?

Glass artist Dale Chihuly had Martin Centre crammed to the rafters for his lecture on Thursday night.

Remember, this is no museum meeting room. This is a huge gymnasium, more commonly packed with roaring basketball fans than with worshipful art fans. The bleachers filled up fast; many people ended up having to stand for the entire presentation.

Obviously, Chihuly is as close as you can get to an art superstar these days. And as somebody pointed out during the question-and-answer session, Chihuly has been accused of being a “master of self-promotion.”

Yet slickness or calculation was nowhere in evidence during his slide show and lecture. He stuck to down-to-earth observations about his most recent projects. There was no bombast, no pretension and no selfpromotion.

He showed slides and a 12-minute video about a Finnish project that he worked on most of the summer. He and about 50 people from his studio went to a glass factory in a remote Finnish town and made dozens of chandeliers (Chihuly’s latest obsession).

These slides and videos did not follow the process of making the chandeliers; instead, they were about the imaginative ways that Chihuly and his pals played with these chandeliers in the Finnish woods.

They hung chandeliers from trees. They stuck pieces of blown glass in swamps, as if they were crystal reeds. They arranged black glass “balloons” on rocks, as if they were seals napping. They even tossed big blown-glass globes into the river and let them float downstream. The whole thing straddled the line between visual art and playfulness.

He also showed slides from Ireland, the Chihuly team’s next stop, where they collaborated with the Waterford crystal artisans. There, Chihuly hung chandeliers in an old castle, just to see what it would look like. (It looked great). One of these chandeliers was made entirely of Waterford crystal, which looked like a million diamonds glittering.

In terms of speaking style, people were probably wishing Chihuly were a little more slick. He obviously did not have a prepared talk and preferred to improvise. Consequently, we learned little about his art beyond what he said about his Finnish and Irish projects.

However, we did learn some interesting things during the question-and-answer session, including the fact that he was very pleased with the installation of his chandelier in the Jundt Art Center and Museum. And we also learned that Chihuly has some Spokane roots - he attended fourth-grade here.

, DataTimes