Posts Tagged ‘glassware’

Artist of the moment………Harvey Littleton

{ February 23, 2014 @ 2:44 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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Harvey Littleton was a great ceramic and glass artist born in Corning, New York in 1922. His father worked for the Corning Glassworks company as a lead researcher and is credited with inventing a glassware still used today called Pyrex.

For his artistic education Littleton attended the University of Michigan where he studied physics for three semesters. The artist quit school and attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art located in Blooming Hills, Michigan. The artist would eventually study industrial design. Whilst a student he was able to learn from two master sculptors Marshall Fredericks and Carl Milles.

Littleton went on to earn a bachelors degree from Michigan and a masters degree of fine art from the Crannbrook Academy. His career started as a ceramist working with simple forms including vases and basic cylinders.

Littleton was key in bringing glass ware from an industrial setting to a more studio setting where studio artists could easily work with his favorite material, glass. The artist gave the first studio glass blowing seminar in 1962 at the Toledo Museum of Art.

The artist served in the Army for three years.

A short clip and brief biography about Harvey Littleton:

In this video we visit Littleton at his workshop:

A student of Littleton that went on to have tremendous respect in the field is the master glass artist Dale Chihuly already profiled here.

Littleton retired from teaching in 1976 to concentrate on his own art.

Harvey Kline Littleton passed away in 2013 at the age of 91 years old.

What wonderful contributions this artist made to the world of glass. Its also interesting to see how a great scientist (his father) was a key element in his appreciation of glass. Where his dad saw industry, the son saw art!

Awesome!

Price range information: Sorry none available.

Harvey Littleton is part of many public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Art located in New York City.

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Artist of the moment….Janet Fish….

{ December 16, 2012 @ 4:30 am } · { Uncategorized }
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Janet Fish was born in Boston, Massachusetts  in the year 1938. She is a leading realist painter who concentrates on still lifes with fruit and also paints wonderful glass and objects wrapped in cellophane. She works in watercolor for the most part. Fish has done works in many other mediums including oils, lithography, and pastels.

Below is a great selection of works by Janet Fish set to music.

I find Janet Fish similar to another artist that loves to work with the still life, Jeanette Pasin Sloan. Sloan improved her level of painting to where she was satisfied with her technical abilities, but still didn’t know what she loved to paint. Thru her struggles Sloan came to find out she loved to paint reflections of objects. As with Janet Fish, the artist is always looking for fun patterns of design.

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Price range infomration: Janet Fish has works in oils ranging from … to $116,500. Pastels can be found between $300 to $10,000. Screenprints are between a few hundred to $1,000. Lithographs can be found for less than $2,000.

Though Fish was born in Boston, she grew up in the warmth of the Caribbean sun living in Bermuda. Her family was very artistic. Her grandfather, an American Impressionist painter named Clark Voorhees, had his studio in Bermuda. Below is an example of his signature style.

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Another uncle, that shared the same first and last name, also was an artist. The second Clark Voorhees became known for his spectacular wood carvings of fish.  Below is a fine example of his sculpture style.

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I really enjoy the way the artist views the world. The viewer can see how much her influence of growing up in Bermuda and the very bright colors help to shape the artist’s view. Instead of quiet and subdued mixtures of burnt umber and payne’s grey, Fish is comfortable using bright and vivid colors in her art.

Fish is also a wonderful painter of different textures. Another genre of the artist is objects wrapped in cellophane paper. She also enjoys painting glass both as both a container holding water, and fun decorative artistic art that you might buy just to display. When I look at some of her paintings of glass I am reminded of Dale Chihuly, the premier American glass artist.

For Fish’s collegiate education Fish attended Smith’s college in Northhampton, Massachusetts and received her bachelors degree in fine art. During one summer break the artist attended the Art Students League of New York.  Fish went on to Yale for her graduate studies and learned more about painting from her well known professor, painter Alex Katz. Katz is known for his very large portraits that emphasize color.

Janet Fish was the first women to earn a master’s degree from Yale’s School of Art and Architecture.

Has also been part of teaching faculties at the Parson’s School for Design and Syracuse University, both located in New York city.

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First solo exhibition in New York took place in 1969.