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Past and Future:
Eric Hopkins is known in Maine both as a painter and as a glass artist. Hopkins, who began teaching glassblowing in 1974, has been making painted drawings for his works in glass for many years. The exhibition "Glass Drawings" will feature 8 of these full scale works works on paper.
With his focus on the natural world and landscape coupled with the natural form of blown glass, Hopkins' works in glass and glass drawings are inclined to present themselves as globes (sometimes studies that play on the distortion of Hopkins' camera lens). At times, Hopkins even draws with molten glass by pulling it over thick sheets of paper and letting the glass burn incise dark marks which he uses to divide his images into ocean, beach and sky. "Glass Drawings," however, is focused on the paintings that Hopkins does when developing his glass sculptures, a body of work which truly pulls his diverse worlds together. Six of the 8 works in the show have been already realized as glass sculptures.
"One of Maine’s most imporant art writers recently told me that his favorite local artist is Eric Hopkins," remarked Daniel Kany: "He was clearly impressed not only with Hopkins' work but with his ability to combine a genuine Maine personality and work ethic with a 'star-quality' all too rare even in the art world. When I told him that Hopkins had begun his professional art career as a glassblower, he was stunned."
Eric Hopkins did not begin at the periphery of the world of glass art. From 1974 to 1980, Hopkins assisted Dale Chihuly at both RISD – where Chihuly was Chair of the Glass Department – and at Pilchuck Glass School, now widely heralded as the most important and historied glass institution in the world. In 1974, however, Pilchuck was still the fledgling brainchild of Chihuly – which was heavily inspired by Maine's Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, which Hopkins had attended for the first time in 1970. Haystack still plays an important role for Hopkins, who was teaching painting and drawing there until August 1st – the opening day of "Glass Drawings” at Daniel Kany Gallery.
Eric Hopkins is a native of North Haven Island, Maine, where he worked until 2006 when he took a studio and gallery space at 21 Winter Street in Rockland, Maine.
Hopkins has exhibited widely for many years. His paintings and glass are held in many private and public collections, including the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Corning Museum of Glass to name just a few.
Hopkins is showing courtesy of the Eric Hopkins Gallery in Rockland.
The Daniel Kany Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of blown glass sculptures by gallery artist Nancy Callan and her colleague Katherine Gray. A Massachusetts native, Callan has developed an international reputation as a glassblower: she has shown her work, taught and demonstrated around the world. Gray, a native of a country that borders America to the north, has taught, published, and exhibited widely throughout North America and the world in major galleries, museums and magazines. As prologue to the exhibition, Callan and Gray taught a July 2008 session at Maine's Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle.
Callan's sculptural glass forms stretch from the playful to the sculptural. Even within a mode that reaches with all its might to be abstract, the Seattle-based artist's works insist on a physical and witty presence. A "winkle" in the Massachusetts native's mind follows its physical strengths to be a talon, a fang, a wing or possibly something as animated as the silhouette of an emperor penguin. Even when trying to pass incredibly complicated rhythms of glassblowing off as a single pattern (even a plaid!), Callan never loses a biological respect for the gestalt; and in so doing, never steps away from her sculptural authority. She walks on a razor-thin ribbon to a place few American glass sculptors have ever trod. And yet she does so with grace, wit and an appealing welcome to her audience to follow and indeed celebrate our own options and possibilities.
A child's toy top in Callan’s hands becomes a spun toy (of masterfully handled glass): a traveling vessel of wit that spins from shiny and playful to deeply philosophical and effortlessly back again. Callan's ability to address the viewer on many levels at once is both the most impressive quality of her work as well as the most subtle. Callan's technical mastery is so complete that the skill and effort are virtually erased from the viewer's sight – not unlike a painter whose technique is so perfect that it hides itself. But Callan has no desire to fool or talk down to the audience. Much of her content may be subtle and deep but her work is eminently approachable. Her skill is perceived by us – the viewing audience – as a gesture of respect towards us: that she would work so hard and so well for our aesthetic pleasure is indeed an enjoyable kindness on the part of the artist.
"Katherine Gray's recent work made me think of... glass as historical material, as part of sumptuous display, as scintillating and visually groovy, as sparkling and glossy and honey on the eyes," said then Glass Quarterly magazine Editor James Yood.
Yood's tone nails Gray's sculptural work beyond the blink of the viewer's eye. A black egg: impenetrable. Empty bowls nesting Wonder Bread logos – our own vacuous memories of the 1970s, maybe? And where does the term "groovy" belong, if anywhere? We might cluck and chuckle to ourselves, yet Gray reminds us of the adolescence and maturation of the Studio Glass Movement. Those critical years, she notes, are not so far behind us – and, further, well distant from an aesthetic moment highlighted by Carlo Scarpa or the heights of Venini. Maybe, she reminds us: the Brady Bunch. The Wonder Years – and not the remake.
Combining wit with wisdom beyond her years (though not so young compared to her spirit), Gray reminds us not only of the historical quirks and vicissitudes of the Studio Glass Movement, but of her standing as an author and thinker as well as an artist. A talented hand, she hints, is nothing without a talented mind. She reflects well on her colleagues and friends: a sharply articulate bright spot in a part of the world that others would pretend is only populated with apologists and mere artisans. Gray is an artist among artists and proud to stand with her colleagues, friends and heroes.
Katherine Gray received her undergraduate degree from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, and her MFA from RISD. She has been the recipient of numerous residencies and fellowships, and her work has been exhibited internationally in many group and solo shows. Gray's work is included in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass and the Museum of American Glass. She has taught across North America as well as in France, Australia, Japan and elsewhere. She lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is a lecturer at the California State University at San Bernardino.
"Glass Drawings" and "Glass Sculpture" will be on display at Daniel Kany Gallery through August 31, 2008.
For more information and publication-quality images, please contact Daniel Kany.
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