Chihuly Glass

So the last posting covered the creation of a simple vase, but what of Chihuly.

Dale Chihuly is a real master of art glass. He ended up teaching at the college where he studied, because he was the one advancing the concepts. His work is exhibited worldwide and he undertakes commissions for corporations, museums and wealthy individuals.

He was blinded in one eye, ironically by glass, but a rather less beautiful piece of windscreen glass, when he was in a traffic accident in the UK, but he still designs and oversees the creation and installation of his work.


He does make some small pieces, either as awards and presentation pieces, or simply to sell to thise who can't spend hundreds of thousands on a chandelier or persian ceiling. Unfortunately even these small pieces cost a few thousand pounds.


Seeing a few of the small bits here was the first time since we started travelling that I wished I still earned money, as I really think I would have set aside my usual spend limits and bought a piece. Instead I just spent a long time admiring it and took a lot of photos!

But the majority of his work is anything but small. The photos here show some large pieces, but they are not nearly on the scale as some of his external installations.

The process that we saw just uses the free blowing method of blowing rolling, and waving the glass around to give it it's shape, with just simple tools used to shape an edge if needed. But another method makes use of moulds and more complex tools to form the glass into more complicated shapes. This method is used a lot by the Chihuly team.

Teams of people are needed for the large pieces, which can be well over twice a person's height. Some will hold and blow the piece from the top of a scaffold, with others twisting the hot glass around moulds, and still others use huge blowtorches to keep the glass at the necessary 1000 degrees centigrade.

Between the creation, transportation and installation of these incredible and delicate pieces, the breakage rate can be around seventy percent. No wonder it is expensive.

His chandeliers are enormous creations of twisting, cornucopias of coloured glass that throw light and shadow across the walls as well as looking amazing themselves.

He will cover a whole wall in his beautiful persians, which look like huge delicate flowers.



Or there are his persian ceilings, which are a glass ceiling filled with varying sizes, shapes and colours of his glass creations.  It is a simple enough idea, but the effect is stunning.  The best way to look at it is to lie down, so I took a photo by putting the camara on the floor with a timer to take the picture.




Then there are his boats...




... and his mixed installations that incorporate his stem like fioras, the sperical nijumas and other pieces, so look like some kind of wild forest growing up out of a mirrored base.

As you may have worked out, I love this glass. So don't tell Nic, but should Dale ever read this, take pity on me and send me a piece for when we have a home again, I would have to consider stopping travelling just so I have somewhere to put it!

Hot Glass

One of the reasons that we picked St Pete as a place to visit was that it has a permanent exhibition of Chihuly glass.  I do like glassware and I especially like the Chihuly glass.  So while in St Pete we went along to both the exhibit, and to a Hot Glass demonstration of glass blowing of a more regular nature. 

Although we did them the other way around, I will tell you about the Hot Glass first as it put some of the Chihuly stuff into better context for us once we realised the time and cost involved in making just a relatively simple piece of glassware.

We watched them blow a medium sized, two coloured vase, and it took two people about half an hour.  They have to make multiple trips to both the crucible, which is a furnace containing the molten glass, and the glory hole, which is the furnace that they use to keep the glass hot enough, as well as heating separate sticks of coloured glass to add to give the second colour. 

Great care is taken to get the shaping right, both by rolling the piece on a work surface and by shaping it in their hand using a large wedge of sodden newspaper to contain the immense heat of around 1000 degrees centigrade that the glass has to be kept at.

 

And the furnaces have to be kept at this temperature all day, everyday, so the vast majority of the cost of hand made glassware is actually fuel to fire the furnaces.

Despite the name, and for the thick and heavy style of vase being made here there is very little actual blowing done, just a little here and there as the glass is built up and the colour added.

The main decorative shaping of the vase was done by swinging and turning the vase, to make the neck flare out in a wavy manner. And suddenly there was an almost finished vase.

We never got to see the final product, as it had to go into the third furnace, the annealer, to be cooled down slowly.  Apparently the colours would have been blue and a bright green.

 

Rock'n'Roll Doomsday

While in St Pete, we were staying at an Airbnb place (will talk about Airbnb in a future post) called the Rock'n'Roll House.  It was an interesting place with eclectic decoration; as well as lots of electric guitars, some signed though we couldn't make out by whom, it had a coffin in the lounge.  We never actually plucked up the courage to check whether it was empty - we figured it was but you just never know!

When we arrived, the guy who met us told us that there was a party in the house that night, as they were previewing an episode of Doomsday Preppers that was about the owner of this place.

Now I don't know if you've heard of Doomsday Preppers, but it a show on National Geographic channel that features various people who believe that the world is going to suffer something catastrophic and follows their preparation for such a doomsday that ends the world as we know it.

Tonight's episode was all about the guy who own the place we were staying in.  He has a family history of doomsday prepping, as his father, Brenton Bruns I was worried about the Y2K, so in 1999 he bought a bomb shelter in the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina.  (In case like me your geography is sufficiently bad that your knowledge of the Blue Ridge Mountains comes from a song that says they are in Virginia, then neither I nor the song is wrong; I checked and the range is huge, huge extending from Georgia up to Pennsylvania.)

Brenton Bruns II is concerned about a huge EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that will make the world - or at least the USA - go dark.  So he has involved his family in building a castle on top of the bomb shelter, to prepare for such an event.  He does say that in fact he is motivated as much by getting his family interacting better as he is by the doomsday threat, but I am sure there must be easier and cheaper ways to arrange a family get together.

Anyhow, we hadn't actually been invited to this party, so we stayed out until about midnight, then figured that if we went back we'd either be included or we could slope upstairs to our room.

We were expecting something riotous to be going on - this is the Rock'n'Roll house after all.  But in fact as we arrived we could hardly hear a thing.  We were greeted by Brenton, who invited us to join them and got us a drink (what is it with the USA and lite beers?). Apparently they were filming inside, so we stayed on the porch with a few other.

News of our arrival obviously spread, as we heard someone ask 'Where are the British people?', and we were soon joined by a few others who were interested to talk to us and hear about our travelling.  They all seemed nice people, and we enjoyed a chat with them, but this was certainly not the kind of party I was expecting for a house of this name.

When the people we were talking to said they had to go, we figured that the rest of the people around - there we only a few - were more to do with the ongoing filming etc, so we decided to leave them to it and go upstairs.  It was only when Brenton said he hoped we wouldn't be disturbed and that he would turn the music down that we realised there was actually any music on.

So not so much Rock'n'Roll, but some nice people and interesting conversations.

St Petersburg, Florida

Not to be confused with the one in Russia, which would have been somewhat of a detour for us!

We were quite pleased to avoid the high cost and inconvenience of the public transport and instead take advantage of the shuttle service between Seaworld Orlando and Busch Gardens in Tampa.  The service is free if you have a ticket to the park, but even if you don't, it is only $10.  And in fact, they never charged us anyway.  So from there we just had to get the rest of the way to St Pete on the local buses.

Mind you, there is not a lot of public transport between the two.  It is OK on weekdays during commuter hours, as there are buses then, but otherwise no buses go across the very, very long bridge that connects the two towns.  So plan carefully if you are doing this journey!

St Pete is a nice little town.  It was very warm while we were there, so perfect for just wandering along the sea front or the pier with its rather unusually shaped pavilion.  Along the pier we we watching a pelican preening itself, when we got taking to a couple who were fishing.  They were British, and spent half of their year at their second home here.

There were lots more pelicans at the end of the pier and we realised why when we saw that there was a guy selling bags of fish so that people could feed them.  We watched one woman wave her fish around while she decided who to throw it to, only to find that when she did throw it, it was grabbed in mid air by a swooping gull.  She learned from that and threw them quicker and lower from then on.

It is a great place to sit in or outside a restaurant and chill out. There are a few museums and so forth, but actually it is good to just people watch.  And if you were going to sit on a bench, then two particular ones were the most interesting; both had sculptures sat at one end, one an alligator dressed in women's clothing, the other an elephant dressed in men's.

We were particularly amused by all of the women taking out their little dogs, often tiny chihuahuas or poodles, in baby buggies.  We would often see them with a buggy with a couple of little dogs sat in it.  They never seemed to actually walk, just go for a ride.

I was slightly less amused though, in fact initially just a little concerned, when an egret started making towards me with a definite purpose and a glint in its eye.  I did think for a minute that it was coming to take a peck at me.

So I was quite relieved when I realised that it was heading for the bush next to me, and more specifically a lizard on the bush.  With one quick dart it had the lizard in its beak.  That was his dinner sorted then.

Over the time we were there, we went to the local market, which was a fairly typical European style market, with lots of food stalls.   It might have been quite good to try some of the food as it looked tasty, but it was so hot that day that neither of us could be bothered to eat and just wanted to find somewhere shady to have a drink.

We also went to the Dali museum.  Nic rather likes Dali, whereas I am less taken by it.  But neither of us had realised the variety of his work.  Whenever I thought of Dali it was of the surrealist melting clocks and such like, but in fact he had a broad spectrum of work and some of it is very good.  I'm still not sure that I enjoy his stuff, but I am rather more impressed by it that I used to be.

It was also quite an interesting building.  It is a new one designed specifically to house this collection. I don't know whether I would especially have thought that it was relevant to him or his work, but then again as we have already established, I know little about either.  Certainly there was a very nice spiralling walkway.

We discovered that Tuesday has special offer on tapas in a couple of places.  That was the day we arrived, so we ended up having tapas twice, once in a nice Italian place for a late lunch, and then as a top up in the evening in a place that had live music.  Both were great.

We also found a few good places for a drink.  There were a number of busy bar/clubs that looked fine, but we opted for a couple that were recommended to us; Ruby's Elixir had tasty cocktails and good live music with the band encouraging visiting musicians and singers to take a turn, and Euphorium which was laid back and had an excellent selection of beers.