Venetian Techniques in Modern Form: a Comparative Work of the Process Driving My Pieces and Those of the Venetian Masters
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Venetian Techniques in Modern Form: A comparative work of the process driving my pieces and those of the Venetian Masters Keywords: Glass, flameworking, lampworking, Venetian, Murano, 3-D art Countless 3-D art forms have persisted over the centuries such as pottery and sculpting and evolve as the artists do. Lampworking is an interesting exception as the art remains relatively unchanged since the Venetian masters of Murano in the 14th century first created the art form. While evidence of glass-making has existed since about the third millennium BC1, the fourteenth-century Venetians were the artists that brought the material to the forefront of modern art2. They invented many tools and pioneered countless techniques that are still used in the art form today. Here I will discuss the inspiration for my work and the Venetian context from which it grew. Series 1: Murrini/Millefiori Murrini (the plural form of Murrine) is one of the most famous techniques created on the island of Murano in the 14th century. Murrini are small cylinders of glass with intricate patterns visible on the flat faces of the cylinders. This technique focuses primarily on the designs in the cross-section of the glass instead of the outside surfaces. In order to obtain the cylinders, the glass is built up layer by layer by adding different colors to make the cross-section in a very short, thick cylinder. This piece is then heated and pulled out into a cane and cut into the Murrini. An example of my canes and the Murrini are shown below. Figure 1: My exotic canes and the murrini cut from them 1 Tait, Hugh 2 Turner, Guy These pieces can be used in larger pieces to create patterns that would otherwise not be feasible to craft. The exposed cross-sections of the Murrini can create dazzling effects like the piece shown below: Figure 2: Murrine Vase by David Platchen3 One cannot discuss Venetian murrini without mentioning millefiori. The millefiori, a subset of Venetian murrini literally named “a thousand flowers,” are flower-patterned typically with bright, saturated colors. Although these look the most outlandish to some, they create very striking patterns that I hope to replicate. In my pieces, I began with a simple linear pattern in blue and white. Since I aim to use these murrini in my later pieces, I decided that a set of two inverted color canes would be a simple yet pleasing start to the series. Figure 3: Blue and white murrini and cane While the previous piece is made of only two distinct layers, the next piece in the series features a more complex pattern with three layers of three different colors dispersed throughout them. This cane 3 Image Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Murrine_Foglio_-_David_Patchen.jpg was inspired by a project in Creating Glass Beads by Jeri Warhaftig. In the project she creates murrini for use as irises in her “eye bead”. The murrini she made in this project featured four differently colored stripes around a core pupil. I took a slightly different take on the pattern and inverted the colors. Directly on the blue core are four white sections alternating between the transparent blue filler and light blue. Putting the light blue between only two of the white sections enables the blue core to stand out more and show through the sides of the cylinder as well as the cross-section. Figure 4: Toothpaste cane and murrini From the sea of blue, I was challenged and inspired to attempt creating “marine murrini”. This is especially fitting seeing as the island of Murano, where much of the Venetian glass was flame-worked, produced many glass sea-creatures in various forms. These murrini would have cross-sections of sea creatures, more specifically – jellyfish. In these pieces, I chose a rather subdued ivory as background filler and encasing to make the transparent yellow of the jellyfish really pop. My first attempt was met with reasonable success (a technical error cut off one of the jellyfish tentacles) and is shown below. Figure 5: Left: Jellyfish murrini try 1. Right: Jellyfish murrini try 2 While the first try was neither a resounding success nor a failure, the second try looks more like a jellyfish. The second rod was also drawn out thinner to more tightly compact the features, but was drawn a bit thinner than I would have liked. Ideally, the cane would be between the thicknesses of the two on the scale that I am working on. My final pieces in the series represent my take on the Venetian millefiori. Adhering to traditional flower colors, I chose a color scheme of opaque green as a core with yellow petals encased in light blue. Even though the yellow and green are relatively close in hue, the high saturations of the colors allow the flower to bloom through the cross-section. I believe this is my most successful piece of the series. Figure 6: Millefiori in pastels with cane and cross-section My second piece in the style of millefiori featured the three primary colors: a yellow base with red petals encased in transparent blue. While traditional millefiori are made with opaque colors, I felt the transparent blue could add a fourth color to the piece. When the saturated yellow base is viewed from the side through the transparent blue we see not only the blue encasing and the yellow core, but a green stem as well. This piece is definitely the most striking of the series. Figure 7: Rainbow millefiori with cane Series 2: Celestial Beads The second main technique I have focused my work on is the technique of Venetian wound beads. Unlike other techniques, wound beads are created individually by winding a heated glass rod around a metal rod called a mandrel (often coated in some type of ceramic compound to aid with bead release). In the case of the ancient glass-makers of Murano, the beads were made on iron or copper rods coated in ashes or fine sand4. Today, the wound beads are most commonly made on steel wire with specially formulated ceramic bead-release. A picture of the coiling process is shown below. Figure 8: Left to right: Glass is wound around the rod, the conplete simple wound bead, and a cross-section of the simple bead5. The rods can be coiled once to make a simple wound bead, or can be wound multiple times to create larger beads. This multiple winding technique is also necessary to integrate different colors into the pieces as color rods can be switched between coils6. The spirally wound bead below is an example of how larger beads can be made with small rods. Figure 9: Two shapes of spirally wound beads. Lines on the beads denote how the rod was coiled7. In this series, I drew the inspiration for my own glass beads from the celestial bodies of our solar system. I remember being fascinated with pictures of the planets taken by spacecraft and telescopes when I was younger. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that most of the pictures I’d seen were actually artists’ renditions of what the planets probably look like based on the incredibly blurry spectrographs the telescopes have taken. This led me to wonder that if digital artists could crate 4 W. G. N. Van Der Sleen 5 Image credit: W. G. N. Van Der Sleen 6 Warhaftig, Jeri 7 Image credit: W. G. N. Van Der Sleen representations of the planets, why couldn’t I? This thought gave birth to my series of eleven celestial bodies created as beads. Pluto, the Sun and the Moon are included in this count because Pluto is still a planet in my mind and the Sun and Moon are simply too iconic to be left out of the series. I knew that working within the limitations of my equipment, the wound bead technique, and my skill; I could not create hyper-realistic renderings of the planets. I embraced this fact by creating the design for my beads around the concept of “the abstraction of realistic” where beads would represent the feel of each body, not look exactly like it. This gave me room to exercise my artistic freedom just as the digital artists had. A photograph of all the beads created in this series is below: Figure 10: From left to right: The Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth (Moon), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto Mercury Mercury is the closest terrestrial planet to the sun. Because of that, it has a raw, gritty feel to it. In order to get this gritty, dusty feel, I used a coloring technique called frit. In this technique the piece is rolled in crushed up glass color when molten to fuse tiny shards of glass into the surface. This creates the look of rocks, or spots sometimes present in glass pieces. In this case, I added a heavy amount of frit to try to emulate the rocky surface. To increase contrast and emphasize the grit, I made the piece on an ivory-colored base. Figure 11: Mercury bead Venus With the second planet from the Sun, I was faced with an interesting decision. Pictures of the planets are shown atmosphere, or without. For most of the planets, there is an iconic look that people know the planets by which made it easy to choose between surface and atmosphere views. For Venus that was not the case. While Venus is soft and fluffy looking in the atmospheric view, it is hot and volcanic on the surface. Ultimately I chose the volcanic look because of the way it complemented the series.