JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

Had to take this book back to the library today. We renewed it twice and now need to share it with someone else. The girls and I loved paging through the pictures, huge color photos of Dale Chihuly’s glass creations.
The title page says Essays by Walter Darby Bannard Henry Geldzahler Copyright 1993 by Dale Chihuly.

I was tempted to write a poem about it, but I think what I’ll do below is leave phrases and excerpts from the pages, my notes, interminglingly the names of pieces with quotes from the book (set in blockquote) with my own descriptions.

Lime Green Basket with Red Lip Wrap
alabaster shapes like unseen sea creatures
sea form set

I’m going to use all 300 colors in as many possible variations and combinations as I can

Cadmium Orange Macchia with Davy’s Gray Lip Wrap
Macchia Courtyard: red and yellow and blue on Honolulu turf

Persians – technicolor crescendoes
creatures discovered in a tropical sea clustered together like anemones
flowers plucked from a remote rain forest: exotic color

Venetians: Leaf Green with Variegated Flowers
Brilliant Cadmium Yellow Venetian with Coils
elaborating and decorating vases
like a little kid’s squiggles of red and blue
Amethyst Venetian with Green Leaves
Ikebana in glass: 12 to 18 glass blowers
Metallic Silver Ikebana with Cadmium Red Flower: almost comical round red clown
Putti flowers look like flames, dahlias
Macchia forest
Chandelier of golden grapes, a harvest of light overripe

Niijima Floats: a floor filled with planets
Honolulu Ice and Neon: 20,000 pounds of ice, red glow

Even though a sphere or a ball is about the easiest form you can make in glass, when you get to this scale, up to 40 inches in diameter, it becomes extremely difficult.

Red, Orange, Mottled, Firey planets, purple, silver: I see Mars, Jupiter, Venus and another galaxy in glass

The Pilchuck stumps insofar as they “look” like anything, look like chrysalises abandoned by giant insects or wax molds left over from casting some more finished work of art. – Roger Downey, The Seattle Weekly, 1992

Looking at this book is becoming a butterfly, seeing newness, breaking through a chrysalis of glass.