Carlyn Galerie

I never had an early interest in glass in particular but always had an interest in creativity.
Sometimes, I’m not too sure where it’s going; but for me, it’s all about being able to make
what I want, when I want, and keep it moving until I can no longer do so. I took the scenic
route on the way to working with glass. I was always interested in the visual arts and music,
and in 1976, I started my education at Kent State University with a major in painting. During
this time, I had a weekend job as a groundskeeper at Hale Farm, an early American historical
village just outside of Kent, Ohio. It was there that I was literally thrown into glassblowing.

Hale Farm has a small glass shop along with other craft areas for visitors to walk around
and ponder. One afternoon, the head gaffer at the glass shop walked off the job after getting
into a tiff with the grounds manager. The manager looked at me and said, “Hunting, get over
to the glass studio and give the guy a hand.” The next thing I knew, I was gathering hot,
molten glass out of a replica of a historic furnace.

When the next semester started at KSU, I found out from a friend that the college actually
had a glass-arts program. There weren’t a lot of universities that offered glass as an art
medium in the late 1970s, and it was there that I took my first steps into being educated
in glass art. Henry Halem ran the program on a very tight budget at that point in time,
and I must say dealt up the best education a young guy could imagine.

Henry was good friends with most of the well-known glass artists, and he brought in many
of them for workshops. Between 1977 and 1979, I attended workshops and worked with the
likes of Fritz Dreisbach, Dick Marquis, Steve Weinberg, Bert van Loo, Marvin Lipofsky,
Dale Chihuly (with William Morris as gaffer), Joel Myers, and the late Bud Hurlstone. KSU
was a place of great creative energy that produced many talented artists in their own right.
I look back at that period fondly and was lucky to have been part of the madness.

1980 was a banner year for me. I went to the Penland School of Crafts on an assistant
scholarship with Rick Bernstein and ended up working for Richard Ritter as a full-time
assistant for around six months. He taught me about making glass color and millefiori.
Penland has always been a Mecca for studio glass artists. In the early 1980s, I visited
many private glass studios and got to meet with or had the pleasure of assisting many
of them in the eight months I was there: Mark Peiser, Billy Bernstein, Gary Beecham,
Steve Edwards, Rob Levin, and Harvey Littleton to name a few.

In February of 1981, I traveled to Italy for two months to experience the Italian glass
scene. My main stops were in Venice and Murano. When I returned, I moved to Chicago. It was there that I opened Hunting Studio Glass in the
summer of 1982.

The birth of my son, Wesley Justin, in 1987 gave my life new purpose. I left the big city
for a more peaceful setting and bought a nice piece of property in central Wisconsin just
outside of Princeton. Once I settled in, I found I had more time to focus on my work, and
that became evident in the detail and coloration that began to emerge.

The Color Field Series began to take shape in the fall of 1982. I had obtained several
barrels of a white opal glass cullet from Fenton Art Glass and used it out of necessity
because I had run out of a source of crystal at the time. The results were outstanding.
The dense, white background was the perfect canvas for transparent colored glasses
I layered onto the surface. It made them radiate a jewel-like quality that I was looking
for. These pieces were considered large-scale at the time. I’ve always enjoyed working
on a larger scale because I get more room to experiment and play with detail in certain
areas. I literally drew on the surface with colored glass rods using a hand torch. It is
interesting that many of these drawings are similar to the still life series I just recently
began. The works in white opal were my first successful series and began to sell quite
well. I believe I produced around a hundred of them. The following 20 years were spent
mastering the techniques used in the Color Field Series. They've evolved slowly into
works that have unique personalities.