John Littleton and Kate Vogel discuss Harvey Littleton’s work. Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:27.

John Littleton (JL): For me, his style was hands on and reacting to the material in the moment of making. Most of the time—sometimes he’d add—after it cooled he’d do a lot of work with it and work with the properties of cold glass. So I think it was just his, his working with the material, mostly; but also, he’d have a vision of what he wanted as well. 

Kate Vogel (KV): And I think his work really changed and progressed. I mean, I think in the early years, most of the artists didn’t have access to a lot of color in a lot of their—their palette was pretty limited by the glass that they were blowing.

JL: They knew ceramics—chemicals and how to get color with ceramics. But they didn’t know the particulars of glass. 

KV: And so I think that they were much more experimenting with it strictly just as a material as it came out of the furnace. And just learning, ‘What can I do with it?’ So I think that there was that high level experimentation early on, and as I think as Harvey developed skills and started to understand what the possibilities for the glass were, I think that that influenced what he was doing with the glass and the ability to start working with color and thinking about layering it and playing with the way the light transferred through the glass. And I always find that there’s a really interesting correlation between the prints from glass plates that he made, and the actual pieces he was making in the hot shop with his glass, where the print he would be printing plates and primary—well, maybe not primary colors, but they could have been. So you might be printing one plate in red and one plate in yellow, and where the yellow and the red overlapped you got orange. And he was using very much that same sort of thing with his glass where he would have layers of glass and the inside color might be a red and he might overlay a yellow on it, and where the yellow didn’t overlap the red, it would stay pure, but where it did you would get more of an orange quality to it, and I think he really liked that idea that, in a sense it’s like mixing colors, but you weren’t mixing them. It was overlaying them and really working with that transparency to see how the colors interacted.