Paul M. Hollister Collection, The Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass
Transcribed by Bard Graduate Center
Title: Edris Eckhardt Lecture, April 29, 1984 (Rakow title: Edris Eckhardt interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168561).
Edris Eckhardt, Lecturer
Location: Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Colleen Terrell, Transcriber
Barb Elam, Editor
Natalie De Quarto, Summary
Duration: 57:17
Length: 21 pages
Notes: This transcript is based upon an audiotaped recording that has been digitally converted. The recording is part of the Paul M. Hollister Collection at The Rakow Research Library at The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, and was transcribed at Bard Graduate Center, New York, New York, for the digital exhibition and archive Voices in Studio Glass History: Art and Craft, Maker and Place, and the Critical Writings and Photography of Paul Hollister. Usage requests for all or part of this transcript must be obtained from The Rakow Research Library at The Corning Museum of Glass.
Paul Hollister often made audio recordings for research purposes in preparation for writing, including interviews with artists and curators, and lectures. The reader should bear in mind that transcriptions of these recordings reflect spoken, rather than written, prose. While every effort was made to be as accurate as possible, the sound quality of the recordings in the Paul Hollister Collection varies greatly. Transcripts have been edited for readability and occasionally condensed. They should serve as a best-effort guide to the original only and not be considered verbatim.
American artist Edris Eckhardt (1905–1998) was known internationally for her sculptural work in ceramics, glass, and bronze. She studied painting and sculpture at the Cleveland School of Art (CSA, later Cleveland Institute of Art) and worked at Cowan Pottery before returning to the CSA to teach ceramics—and, later, enamels and glass—from 1933 to 1971. From 1935 to 1941 she also was head of Cleveland’s sculpture division in the Works Progress Administration’s Public Works Arts Project. Eckhardt began working in glass in the 1950s. She rediscovered ancient Egyptian methods of enclosing gold foil between glass layers and developed many innovative new techniques, including a method for combing glass and bronze in cast Sculptures.
Summary: In this slide lecture at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., Edris Eckhardt shows numerous examples of her work, explains the development of various artistic processes she has used throughout her career, and discusses her influences, ranging from religion to literature.
Mentioned: aluminum, The Corning Museum of Glass, Emily Dickinson, fusing, glass reliefs, gold glass, investment casting, lost wax process, molten glass pens, Paul Perrot, sculpture, sheet glass
Related asset: Paul Hollister, “USA Studio Glass before 1962/vor 1962: Maurice Heaton, Frances and Michael Higgins, Edris Eckhardt, Four Pioneers and True Originals/Vier Pioniere und Wegbereiter,” Neues Glas, no. 4 (October/December 1985): 232-240.
[Transcriber’s note: This is a recording of a talk delivered by Edris Eckhardt. Various members of the audience occasionally interrupt to ask questions from their seats, and sometimes audience exclamations can be heard as Eckhardt speaks. These are transcribed where audible.]
Unidentified Presenter (UP): [inaudible] So I’d like to present to you Edris Eckhardt.
[sound of applause]
Edris Eckhardt (EE): I hope you’ll forgive me if I sit down while I talk. First of all, I’ve been on my feet for almost two days in the gallery, and a few months ago I had an automobile accident. It’s left me with a bad back, so that if I stand very long I’m uncomfortable. So, I’m going to sit down and talk to you. And I think it’s a very informal, small crowd. Now, as I show these slides, it may occur to you ask a question about something about the technique or about—if there’s anything you want to break in and ask, do so. It won’t offend me. And then at the very end when I’m all through talking, if there’s questions and answers that you want to have about techniques or subject matter or whatever, I will give you twenty or thirty minutes to ask questions, unless it’s too late [audience laughter].
This is my very first piece of gold glass, when I first started to experiment with it. And I had the very good fortune of when I first started to experiment with it, on my very first try I got gold glass. But I didn’t take any record of the materials, or how much of anything, or even the temperatures in the furnace. Consequently, I experimented more than a thousand times before I got my second piece of gold glass. [audience laughter] And I think the thing is, the fortunate part is that had I experimented maybe 400 times, I would have given it up. But I could always look at that gold medallion and think if I did it once, I can do it again. And since I had been told it was one of the truly lost arts that had been lost for centuries, I was very eager to find it and invoke the very beautiful art.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
So going backwards, now this is a little panel and you can see how brilliant gold glass is, and how sparkly it is. This is a little panel that was in a baptismal [inaudible] in one of the churches in Cleveland.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That’s another piece of gold glass, on red glass, and the pattern is engraved into the gold with a stylus, and the color is put on over the top of the gold in very thin sheets of glass, which I roll out with a wet rolling pin on hot marble, and make glass that’s about as thin as a piece of typing paper. And then I tuck those colored sheets of glass underwater with a nail scissors, and I cut ’em under water so they don’t fly and get in my eye or cut me, and put those little tiny fish scales of glass all over these things for color.
Unidentified Audience Member (UAM): What do you mean by gold glass?
EE: I used 24 karat gold in between the layers of glass. And when I’m using silver glass now on that one at the bottom you’ll see silver glass; that’s cold gray. And the upper part is gold glass, then it goes into silver glass again. And where you see the gray, there’s silver in between the layers. Where you see the golden colors, there’s gold in between the layers. And you can only use pure silver or pure gold.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That’s a close-up of one of the ones that I made, and that’s silver glass. And you can see the crystallization that appears all over the glass; this is highly magnified. And you can also see how the silver has turned a blue glass yellow. The silver will turn that particular kind of glass yellow and make a beautiful yellow with the gray.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That’s my idea of Eve getting the apple. I never believed it was an apple; I always thought it was a pomegranate. [audience laughter] And I make her crawling away almost like the snake. because she’s sneaking the apple.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
There’s another piece of gold glass, very rich in color. And very medieval in feeling. All that color is put on in flakes, some of them no larger than my little fingernail or not even as large as that. And I’ll pick them up with a tweezers and put them on with gum and attach them to the gold that is on the first sheet of glass. Now this one the first sheet of glass happens to be a gold ruby. And the colors that are on top of it have to be made. I make all my own glass incidentally. I roll my own glass, make my own cullet, and make my own sheet glass that goes on top of the gold and silver. Because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t know whether it was going to fit, and if it doesn’t fit, it’ll crack sooner or later, or maybe just as soon as you take it out of the kiln. All of the glasses have to be compatible. So these are all compatible glasses.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that’s the same piece viewed from within. A lot of my pieces are shadow boxed. And they have the quality of existing independently, whether they are lighted.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that one is not lighted [inaudible] It’s only lighted from within, and no light from without.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That one’s been lit from within and also has a light from without. Now if you light it on one side only it’s a different thing again, but I don’t have a slide of that.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
This is the burning bush, and I’ve made the burning bush many times. It’s one of my favorite subjects. I think it’s a very dramatic moment. And the gold part of course is gold glass. The gray is silver, and whenever you put red on silver it turns gray.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that’s another piece. The whole glass—it’s Angel of the Morning—would be in a beautiful shade of limpid blue. But where I put the silver on where the Madonna occurs, it turns a beautiful shade of golden yellow. And it has very slight additions of color here and there.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
(UAM): Hmm.
EE: Now that one was commissioned by the Cleveland Museum of Art [Ohio] after I did the other one that you saw earlier. They saw that one and wanted to have this one for a memorial piece for one of their members of the museum that had died. And this was commissioned by the Cleveland Museum; it was called Knights and Squires.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That one is called In the Garden, and it’s all gold glass. And the outline of the eye is to cut through the gold to the back of the glass, which is a very dark red. So the dark red of the glass underneath is what is giving you the outline in the nose, in the hands, and the eye.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this one, The Knight Found the Unicorn—I often use the unicorn, an animal I especially like. Cause nobody could prove you’re wrong when you draw it [audience laughter] because nobody ever saw one. So they can’t argue about how wide its nose should be or how dainty its hooves should be [audience laughter] or how long its body is. No one has any proof, so it’s one of those animals that I love to use. And they always say that the unicorn can only be captured by a virgin. So in this case I decided to make a man that was a virgin who’s riding the unicorn [audience laughter].
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this one, The Virgin and the Unicorn—it’s another example of that—has got black enamel on it to reinforce the line. This is one where black enamel has been used. And it’s enamel that I made especially for glass. It isn’t the same kind of enamels that you would use on copper. It’s enamel I compound to work with this red ruby glass.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
UAM: Does that go in between or on top?
EE: On top of. You want it back again?
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That black enamel is on top of the gold and on top of the red glass. It’s the very last layer, and it’s the very last fusion. I probably should have mentioned that some of these things, like the Knights and Squires, have been in and out of the kiln about 10 to fifteen times to build up the layer of color to just what I want. I rarely ever stop with one firing. And with each time you fire it, you’re in danger of the glass cracking. You’re running that risk. But you’re willing to take the risk if you can make it more beautiful.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
UAM: How many layers of the glass do you use?
EE: Basically the old gold glass was a layer of dark glass like dark blue, and then one a lighter color like pale green or colorless glass on the top. But some of the ancients also used some color with the gold glass, and I like that the best because I’m very fond of color. And to have it just two colors seems a little limited to me. And I’m sure that unicorn and the knight is a lot happier looking with the color than it would be if it was just dark red with a pale or transparent white glass over the top. That makes it much more festive. Oh, and those jewels that are in it. I had to invent a pen that I can draw with molten glass, and later on you’ll see a whole group of trees that have been drawn with this pen of molten glass. And these are like making a period with your hand, you know, that you just make one dot? That’s what these are. From these pens.
UAM: You said you invented this?
EE: Sure. [audience laughter] It wasn’t invented, so I had to invent it myself. I’m sorry I get these buttons mixed up. Now this one is Veronica’s Veil. And it’s a very, very delicate thing, of Christ’s head on the kerchief, and that is in silver glass on blue. And it’s on nine different layers, the drawing of the face of Christ, so that part of that comes close to you, part of it goes away, part of it looks very much in the background. That is a nine-layer piece of glass, with silver.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this one is The Landscape of the Unconscious. And when I was out in Berkeley, I attended a lecture that showed slides of the mind and the brain. And it fascinated me how much the brain looks like parts of landscape or vegetation. So I went back to my studio where I was working in Berkeley, and I made this thing that looked like some of the slides I had seen, pictures of the brain, and called it the Landscape of the Unconscious. So when I got home I put it in the Cleveland Museum of Art exhibition, and there were two doctors standing there looking at this and talking about it, and one fellow said, ‘If I didn’t know she didn’t know that much, I’d think that was a picture of the brain.’ [audience laughter]
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this is Emily Dickinson again. I’m very fond of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and her character. And I’ve got I think about 25 books about Emily and all of the versions of her poems and her complete list of poems. And this is Emily as a young woman walking through the woods with a bird in her hand. Because she was very conscious of God’s tiny creatures, and she was very conscious of the seasons, and she was very close to nature. So this is timid Emily with her mantle of blue [inaudible], walking through the winter woods, with a bird in her hand. That is incidentally Corning Glass [The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York] owns that.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this is a new one that I made for this show that is over at The Glass Gallery [Bethesda, Maryland], and I call that one Slumber, for obvious reasons. And that has got sort of an eggplant glass over silver, and the basic glass color of the underneath layer is a beautiful sapphire blue.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this one isn’t here, but I made it quite recently, and it’s called Flower Shop. And it’s just a young girl surrounded by flowers. And I repeated the shape of the bowl in the bottom with the shape of the hanging basket up above. I’m very fond of putting women in gardens with flowers. There seems to be something very appropriate.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that one, the only reason it’s in—it’s a very bad slide—is to show you the length that people will go to when they love something. A man bought this piece of mine, which was one of the finest silver glasses I ever made called The Arrangement, and it’s quite oriental in feeling. But he didn’t like my frame, and he didn’t like my mat. He paid $400 for the glass, and then went off to Bonfoey’s in Cleveland [The Bonfoey Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio] and paid $750 to have it framed. [audience laughter] And it’s a beautiful framing job. None of my work looks like this [audience laughter], framed like this. I can’t afford $700 frames.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that’s a close-up picture of another version of The Arrangement that you just saw. And this is another one that’s done in silver. And if you’re wondering what those crossbars are, on the picture, wherever you overlap a piece of silver over the other silver, it’ll make a double indentation of silver and will be whiter or lighter in color. And that can’t be avoided. The only way you could avoid that is if some way you could get a rolled sheet of silver that’s almost a foot wide, which you can’t find. They’re all in like six-inch squares.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that is called The Midnight Bouquet, and I’ve done about fifteen different versions of this Midnight Bouquet. I saw a bouquet when I was in the hospital, in the moonlight, the only cheerful thing there. And they had the drapery pulled back, and the woman that was in the bed next to me had some of the most beautiful flowers sent to her. So I couldn’t sleep in the hospital, and I spent my time making drawings of this, what I call Midnight Bouquet. And this is one version of it. And in this one, the vase becomes a hand that’s holding an egg. And I often use the egg as a symbol. And the face of the woman looking out from the flowers.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that’s one of my very first reliefs. Being a sculptor—and another thing I think I ought to tell you. Most glass people that are working in glass today have approached glass from the standpoint of craftsmen or designers. In other words, they have not usually studied sculpture as a major. Nor have they majored in painting. They’ve majored in one of the crafts. And I majored in sculpture and painting. So my work is really bound up in with fine art rather than the crafts. And when I got the gold glass and the silver glass technique down, I wanted to do something in glass relief, and this is my very first experiment—and it came out very well—in an investment that I made out of gypsum and silica and a press mold that I pressed the wax into the mold, and made an impression of it. And this is my little sun goddess girl that I use over and over again. She’s in the gallery over there in color, in The Glass Gallery. So that’s my very first experiment with glass relief. That’s my second experiment with glass relief. And you can see how sharp and clear it is.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
UAM: Hmm.
EE: There’s my third one. That one won first prize at the May Show [an annual exhibition presented by the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1919 to 1993], and the museum bought it, and it was always on the museum director’s desk. This one’s called Cherubim, looks very much like a piece of jade.
UAM: When did you start in glass relief?
EE: I started in glass relief about 1954. I was working with gold and silver glass all during ’53, and about mid-’54, I started with the glass relief. And then not content to do just glass relief, I went into full-dimensional glass sculptures.
Now this is another glass relief, of the forbidden garden.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And that’s a head of Ruth. It’s a life-sized glass relief, about two inches thick. And it’s very difficult to do a relief that thick, because part of the thing is only—less than a half an inch in this thinnest part, and that makes great strain on the glass.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That’s another Madonna and child. This one I made for my mother for Christmas.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And that is one that took first prize in Wichita called Vernal Equinox; it’s the coming of spring to the earth. It’s now in a doctor’s collection.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That one is Uriel, and that is the angel that’s—I think they should have kept in the Bible. It’s another one of the angels that was taken out of the Bible. My name is a Biblical name, ‘Edris,’ taken out of the Bible, because [inaudible] wasn’t possible. And this one is the angel of destruction, which the Jews believed in very thoroughly. For instance, Sodom and Gomorrah got their message from Uriel, not from Gabriel. Uriel was the angel that always brought the messages to earth when God was displeased. So this is the angel of God’s anger. That’s why it’s done in red. I might say that Corning Glass has this angel face, but they have it in blue. But I think the red is more authentic.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That one is the eternal light, and I did this one for a synagogue. And it shows the one eye up between the wings of the eye of God, and the angel is [inaudible] balancing the chalice of light.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
This is a close-up view of one that later on you’ll see the whole box, showing how I make little things that would go in a box and incorporated into one great design. This belongs in the box. But later on you’ll see it’s called the Night of the Doll’s-Eye.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
This is another relief of an angel, carrying a chalice of light. And this one has a copper reduction all over it. It was green glass that has been reduced to give it all those rosy tones. So that one has copper reduction to give you this beautiful rose.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That was my very first [inaudible] sculpture when I decided I wanted to do things in three dimensions. And this was the very first one that I got out of the kiln. And she came out just about perfect. And that, I knew the Egyptians made molds for their sculptures, and I use gypsum, which is what the Egyptians had and also silica to make it strong enough to make the investment for this. Now one lady here already asked me what’s the difference between a mold and an investment? It’s a matter of what profession you’re talking about. Glass is a metal, and bronze is a metal. And when you’re making a mold, which everybody understands—a mold is a mold—you’re making a mold for bronze, or glass, it’s called an investment. That’s the technical term for it. If I’m making a mold for porcelain or ceramic, that’s a mold. That’s the difference. The difference in what the different professions call their equipment.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That I made the first year that I was working in glass in 1954 in sculpture, and that got first prize at the museum. It’s in a very important collection now. And her crown was all like filigree, you could take a toothpick and run it in between the fibers in the crown. It’s all like lace.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And that one is the angel that Corning Glass owns; I always call her the Corning Angel. And that’s the angel Gabriel. And I’m very [inaudible] very often will make the angel’s wings like a hug, and this is sort of a conventionalization that I use. I don’t know that any other artist has done that or not. And that’s done in blue and rose and crystal and aqua black. Now someone asked me yesterday at the gallery how I got all the different colors if I poured a mold. I didn’t pour them. I put the glass in cold. And I don’t use the pâte de verre process at all, which I despise, because it looks like something to eat, like [inaudible]. [audience laughter] I don’t like the texture; I don’t like the look; I don’t like the color of it. But I wanted to use glass that would have translucency without being transparent. I also do not like the transparent blue enamel they make at Corning. As a sculptor this bothers me a lot to see light shooting in all directions through a sculpture. But to see light just bouncing off edges, like the crown and the tips of the wings, the tips of the fingers, this I like. And the way I get the different colors, I use cullet, which is broken up pieces of glass, rather than glass powder, and I put the colors in where I want them in this investment with the long tweezers. And I put the piece in by piece; it takes me about a day to fill a mold like that with color.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that was about the third one I made, which is owned by a museum in Dallas. And that is entirely colored by silver, with a blue glass. So it gets its yellow color from silver, silver oxide.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That’s a mermaid. She should be blue, but the slide didn’t turn out the right color.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now one of the ladies that lives near here owns this head, the gothic head. And I’ve always loved this piece. And this has about eight different shades of blue in it. And I carve these from wax. In other words, all my models for glass are made of wax first, carve them out of wax. And that accounts for some of the stylizations you see, because you cannot work in wax like you would in clay. It’s an entirely different medium. And so all of these things are done by the lost wax process, which is the same thing that you would use in bronze.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That’s The Galway Lady. I did two versions of Galway Lady, the ladies that walk the cliffs of Ireland, watching for their fisherfolk men to come back. So many of them are lost at sea. And on a stormy windy day you’ll see these women walking the seawall with a scarf around their heads and these heavy woolen homespun draperies they use that don’t blow much because they’re so heavy. And they walk the seawall to watch for their men to return. So she’s my second version of The Galway Lady. And there was one in The Glass Gallery. Only the one in The Glass Gallery is in a lovely shade of peach.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
So there’s one of the fish I made, and Corning Glass thought these were very jolly. I must have made about 300 of these fish mounted on bronze rods and in a vase. And I made all different kinds of fish because I think fish and beetles have so many different designs that you could never make them all. You wouldn’t live that long. So it’s fun making these things; they’re kind of jolly.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That reclining nude is very much like the one that’s over at The Glass Gallery now, only the one in The Glass Gallery is in a limpid shade of green, like a green, almost a sea green. And this one was in Washington years ago, and it was in the show that was I believe in the Smithsonian. And the government bought this piece for the French Embassy in Paris. So this one is now in the French Embassy in Paris.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
This one was a little bit over life size and in green, four tones of green, most of it about the color of green jade.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
UAM: What was the title of that last one?
EE: Ah—Undine. The woman that dwells under the water. And this one is called The Nazarene. It’s too dark a slide. It’s a very dignified piece, and it’s very peaceful.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That’s another one I made, and the woman that owns this always puts it near a bouquet of flowers. And she calls the figure Flora. She bought it before I even had time to give it a name. She calls it Flora. [audience laughter]
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And that is a head of a woman in full maturity, instead of being a young woman. This is a mature woman. And this also is done in this peach glass that I made using gold salts to color the glass. I don’t make any of this glass anymore; it’s too expensive to make. I made this glass when gold salts, or gold, was selling for $36 an ounce instead of $900 an ounce. [audience murmurs] I don’t fool with that gold salt formula anymore; it’s too expensive.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this was a very large piece that I made when I was teaching out in Berkeley in ’62, and that was supposed to go in a patio garden and become then a long screen over a white concrete slab and against a white concrete wall, and so sun would hit that—it was made so that it would keep revolving—it would hit it and all these different fins of color would hit these white walls and floor, and it was perfectly beautiful. That was more than 24 inches in diameter. And it was all just fins of glass loosely attached to each other and made into a revolving decoration for a garden.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this one is one I’m very fond of, and this one is in The Glass Gallery. I borrowed it back to put in the show. It’s called Phaedra. This also is in that beautiful peach glass that I made using gold salts.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That one is a Phaedra and it’s not very true to color, because the color in this has about four or five shades of blue, plus aqua and gold. But it’s a Phaedra, and that one stands about 24 inches high. Most of the figures you see are in the range of 12 to 15 inches high; this one is 24 inches high. Now this is the Mad King of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. I made a whole series of 10 of Alice in Wonderland subjects, and I kept them as near the [John] Tenniel drawing as I could and still keep them sculptural. And I declared this as an edition of five, and all of them are in the hands of collectors.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That’s the Queen of Hearts, and Alice with the flamingo and the little hedgehog that follows her using for the [inaudible], and the little knave of hearts crawling around to try to put himself in the most advantageous place as a wicket. And the [inaudible] Queen is hollering, ‘Off with their heads.’ So I’ve always liked Alice; I read the book about once a year, and I always find something new in it. But it’s fun doing it, and there’s one over in The Glass Gallery; The White Knight and Alice is over there.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now these heads were also very large; they were 25 inches high, and quite heavy. And I might say when you have the investment on them, they weigh over 150 pounds, and I used to handle these and get them in the kiln by myself, but I no longer can do it. I suppose that’s why I have such a wrecked back anyway; I’ve been lifting so heavy for so many years. But that would weigh you see about 150 pounds with the investment and the glass.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And here’s another view of it. It’s a very limpid blue; it has about five different blues in it. They’re very large, and they’re very sculptural.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And incidentally I made those blue heads about in 1960, they were made. Now this is the coming of autumn, or the autumnal equinox. It’s autumn coming to the earth with all the fruits of the harvest in the [inaudible].
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That piece was about 26 inches high. Now this golden horse is over at The Glass Gallery, and while it doesn’t seem too large—it’s only probably about nine or 10 inches long—that weighs almost 100 pounds when it goes into the furnace. And again, I’m not making any of these real large things anymore. I’m going to continue working, but I’m going to work on lighter weight things.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that one belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art [Pennsylvania], and it was a juggler, with clown suit with dominoes and diamond-shaped patterns in it. And I had a bet with Paul Perrot at the Corning Glass Museum that I could do that. And he said the colors would all run together. And I said, ‘Not as long as it’s fused right.’ So I took a magazine and sat down all night, down watching the kiln to turn it off just at the right time so that the colors wouldn’t merge and run together. And I won my bet. [audience laughter] That’s a vertical laminate. Now this is another thing that Paul Perrot said he was amazed that no one ever thought of doing vertical laminations. A great many people do horizontal laminations, and a horizontal lamination is like making a sandwich, layer upon layer. A vertical laminate is like putting books in a bookend. They’re standing on end. And the beauty in making that and having an illuminated box, is that as you walk around it, even three or four feet around it, all of the colors change in your eyes as you keep your eye on it because you’re filtering every color through a different color as you walk. It’s very optical.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this one—sorry, that’s in upside down—it’s a story of a drop of water, and you can imagine that drop of water that’s pink there coming up through there and the part that is at the top is the delta. It was the story of a drop of water where it starts—a drop of water that goes into a stream that goes into a river, and the river goes into the sea. That is in a very fine collection.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And it’s in several books, I might add, on glass. Now this one is in a very good collection, and it was called The House of Many Mansions. It was also in several magazines at the time, and it was also in Glass ’59 [Glass 1959: A Special Exhibition of International Contemporary Glass] at Corning.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
This is one that I often wish I’d kept for myself, and this one is over at The Glass Gallery, called Curtain of Time. This one is a horizontal laminate, and it also has a piece of blown glass and chunk glass that drops back into the shadow box about three or four inches deep. And it gives you the sense of time passing when you look at it. It’s as near as I can give you the concept of passing time.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
This one is in the museum at the Everson [Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York], and it’s called Pomp and Circumstance, and it was all done with glass cut in diagonal shapes of color fitted and fused together. And part of it, that looks almost black, is gold, gold foil.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that one was called Program for Intimidating, and I did this during our space flight, and this is like a space rocket that’s above the earth, and all of these lines represent all of the computer analysis that they have to go through to do a launch and keep it up there. It was one of my space objects that I made; I made about a dozen of them. One was called The Other Side of the Moon. And I made that long before we ever got to the moon. And so the woman that bought that piece was watching the television program at night about four o’clock in the morning when the first moon shot came over of what the other side of the moon that we had never been able to see looked like. And she called me up at four o’clock in the morning [audience laughter], she said, ‘Are you watching that program about the moon?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘How did you know what the other side of the moon looked like?’ [audience laughter] She said, ‘Looks just like your piece. We have it [inaudible] sitting right in front of us.’ So it was pure guesswork but apparently was a little serendipity there.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that I made for a home for an artist out on the West Coast, in Berkeley. These were about 30 inches long, and about 24 inches wide, and they represented the vegetation out in California and in her garden. And she had clerestory windows that went all around her living room, and the living room were solid walls with just this band of clerestory windows, and every window had one of these vegetation that represented the growing life out in Berkeley.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this is one of the things that I made with the pen that I invented, the pen that draws with molten glass. And this one is over at The Glass Gallery, and you’ll see it. There you’ll see the mountain and the lake and the storm cloud, but this picture is not very good.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And this is a picture of a winter wood. And if you notice that winter wood is drawn on a sheet of glass that has about five shades of gray, and two shades of rose, and another shade of pale blue, and these are all laminated together, and then the drawing of molten glass is on top of that.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this one is over in The Glass Gallery, and it’s on a gold ruby glass, and it’s a drawing with molten glass, and some of the pieces of glass drawing are finer than a human hair. And it’s really kind of fun to get up close to these and look at it and see how fine some of that is. And in between the branches of this burning bush, I have crystallized glass that fires at a higher temperature than either the drawing glass or the background sheet of glass. And since it takes a higher fire than on the upper surface it won’t crack the glass, but it stays crystalline in form so it gives texture within the tree.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this is The Night of the Doll’s-Eye. As I told you that I have one of the copies of it here. You see down in the lower left-hand corner, that little piece that it said would appear in The Night of the Doll’s-Eye. It’s supposed to tell the story of the Indians who believed in the cohosh root, or the doll’s-eye, being guard against snake bite, and they thought that it would only guard you or keep you or help you if it was gathered in the light of the full moon. So they gathered all this cohosh root in the full moon to use it as a cure for snake bite. And, actually, what they didn’t know, there’s a blue cohosh, and there’s a black one. And it would depend on which root you were getting as to which one would be curative. But the Indians thought it had something to do with moonlight. So I did this thing that has in that round circle there you see these little things like pollywogs and things that are in the pools of water. You see on the one above that the mushrooms that grow at night, and if you look very carefully you can see eyeballs of the owl and the fox, I made the eyeballs of the fox and the raccoon and one other—the owl. And then there are drips of water coming down in the upper left-hand corner because there’s always water falling in the woods. And this was blown glass, fused glass, sculptured glass. So it used nearly all my techniques. It was mounted in a wood box, very much like a [inaudible] case only larger, and part of the squares were white [inaudible] part of them was black. And this is a very heavy piece; it must weigh about 50 pounds. And a man bought it, and he put it where I wouldn’t have it for the world. He wanted it where he could look at it when he was trying to go to sleep, or go to bed. He put it right above his bed, on the wall. [audience exclamations] I wouldn’t have [audience laughter] [inaudible] sleeping for anything. And I knew how heavy it is, and I can’t borrow it back from him because it’s a permanent installation, but I often wonder how long it’s going to stay there. [audience laughter]
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now that’s another experiment in blowing glass and fusing glass and using these black backgrounds and then made a whole wall of this blown and fused glass for a divider for a room, in a music room. It was a whole wall of glass. This is another one with the blown and fused glass, and the glass that magnifies, and the glass that makes the object appear smaller as you look at it. So it’s got magnifying glass, [inaudible] glass, and just glass bowls, and this was bought and accepted by a man who is an ophthalmologist. He said it was a good thing to hang in his office. [audience laughter]
UAM: These were about 1967?
EE: The ones that are blown?
UAM: Yes.
EE: No, they were earlier. They were about ’61 or ’62 when I was fooling around with the glassblowing and making these boxes. Now this is one that—I started doing this kind of work out in California because there’s so much vegetation. And I only have two of them. I don’t consider it serious glass work, incidentally. But it’s decorative. You could actually use a real butterfly, but I never use them, catch ’em and kill ’em. I just find them dead and use them.
UAM: Mm-hmm. [laughs]
EE: And I use a piece of seaweed, down in the bottom, and there’s more seaweed at the top, and there’s a white moth, right where that streak of white comes in, and I made an undersea garden. And that is one thing that you can do is take any plant life that’s quite flat, and hemlock is very good to use or some forms of pine, and the maple flower’s bloom and you can make a perfect image of the dandelion seed in glass, and it’s beautiful. And if you want to color them, you simply put the flowering plant in copper oxide or cobalt oxide or whatever, and then you get that color. If you don’t do that, it will turn the color of the minerals that are in the thing, and the way that—if you’re wondering why it doesn’t burn up when you fuse it, it’s a very simple principle which you probably learned when you were in junior high, that you can’t burn up anything in a vacuum, and these are sealed as a vacuum so the things that are inside can’t burn up [inaudible] the glass fuses together and it’s trapped in there forever.
And one time I wrote a letter to Paul Perrot at the Corning Glass Museum and I sent him just a little sheet of glass about five inches long and about 10 inches wide, and I wrote in it, ‘Letter enclosed.’ And he wrote back, ‘I only found a piece of glass, but there’s no letter.’ And I said, ‘Get a magnifying glass and look at that glass, and you’ll find your letter.’ I had written on rice paper a note and put it in the sheet of glass and fused it. And it reduced itself down to being such a small speck he didn’t even notice it when he looked at the glass [audience laughter], but with a magnifying glass you could read the whole thing. You could read it and see a secret message if you were a spy. [laughs] Oh, I’m going the wrong way again. I’m Wrong Way [Douglas] Corrigan all the time.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this one is called The Flight of Icarus, who was Daedalus’s son, and he had his wings made out of wax and feathers, and he was warned not to fly near the sun or his feathers would dissolve and he would fall into the sea. Of course he didn’t mind his father, and he fell into the sea. And this is the moment when the feathers are all coming apart. Now those are actual birds’ feathers that I collected from a friend of mine that owns a number of different kind of birds, and I painted in a background, and fused these feathers in here and they come out like this. Now anyone if they had a kiln could use flowers and vegetation, and I wrote articles for Ceramics Monthly about this process, explaining the whole thing thoroughly, and anyone can do this.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this is gold and bronze; this was my last development, which was about 1962. I finally developed a method of reducing glass that was solidly embedded in bronze and was part of it. A perfect wedding of bronze and glass. And this one was the largest piece I ever made. The piece incidentally was offered to the Renwick Gallery by the doctor that owns it, and they took instead the piece that’s downstairs. I think if it had been me, I would have taken this Byzantine screen.
This Ancient Splendor.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now there’s the way that Ancient Splendor looks if there’s a light behind it. All of the red and the amber and the gold will show if there’s a light behind the screen I just showed you. There’s another one of bronze and glass. This one’s done out in Berkeley on the West Coast in ’62.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And another one. Pure Good and Evil, also done out on the West Coast.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
The Blue Phoenix was done here in Cleveland in’62, and that has vertical laminate glass wings. You can see that in the neck of the bird, the body of the bird, the two wings, and the tail. All have been laminated—vertical laminate of glass in it, and it’s called The Blue Phoenix. And I just recently heard last summer about the fate of The Blue Phoenix. I sold it in ’62 for $600, which is very cheap for a bronze. Now I couldn’t even get the casting done for that. But I sold it for $600 and had a woman call me from San Francisco to tell me that she had paid $15,000 for a bronze that had my name on it. [audience murmurs] And did I have any more of these bronzes? [audience laughter] She said, ‘I was so lucky to outbid. I thought I would have to go to $20,000. I was prepared to do it, but I got it for $15,000. So, I’ve got an extra $5,000. Do you have anything like it?’ [audience laughter] And I’m just so flabbergasted about the increase in value from $600 to $15,000 that I could hardly speak to the woman. [audience laughter]
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now there’s another one that is called Fertility Symbol. And I’ve worked a lot with the American Indians, and this has a lot of the symbols that the American Indians use—of the snake and the—which really looks like the sperm and the egg of fertility, the fertility symbol.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And a restaurant man bought this and he’s got it in his window, upstairs. And this one comes from the desert flowers of Arizona. It’s a desert cactus in bloom, and this is bronze and glass. This is a close-up of the one you just saw, in bronze and glass.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
There’s another bronze and glass, but it’s not a good photograph because the bronze turned out all looking like yellow egg.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Oh, I guess we have to put in the next carousel that shows the [inaudible] And there’s only a few more slides.
UAM: Did you have any problems combining bronze and glass?
EE: I’ll begin with this, and then I’ll explain it as we go along with this. This shows what you do. You fuse the glass first into a design, and then you build your model—[inaudible] go out—and then you build your model in wax around the glass so that you have your sculpture just the way it’s going to appear in bronze and glass. And then you make an investment over the top of that. And investment remember to the layman means ‘mold.’ And then you burn out your wax. Your glass stays behind in that cavity, but the secret is you’ve got to remember not to burn that out above 900, or you’ll melt your glass, or change your glass. And one of the things that is a problem in glass and bronze sculpture is that most bronzes wouldn’t work with glass. I had to develop a bronze alloy that could work. In other words, I had to have a bronze alloy that would pour and take detail nicely at about 2200 degrees as opposed to 2300 degrees. I also had to have a bronze alloy that would stay a lovely bright gold and wouldn’t discolor and get a lot of fire scale. I also had to have a bronze alloy that when the bronze would cool, it wouldn’t shrink and crush the glass. Because remember there’s no way for the glass to get any smaller. But if the bronze shrinks, it’ll crush it just like a nutcracker. So I had to have a bronze that didn’t shrink, a bronze that stays gold, and a bronze that could be poured at 2200 degrees. And I worked I think about two weeks on different batches of bronze, and bronze formula, to get the one that would work with glass.
Now how do you get the glass to work with the bronze? One of the things you had to do was remove all water from the glass. In every piece of glass that you look at or use there’s water as part of the formula. That had to be removed. I removed water from the glass by introducing selenium into the furnace. Now again that’s a thing you have to be careful of, because selenium gas is not very healthy to inhale. And another thing, I had to have a glass—this is one that’s aluminum and glass—I had to have a glass that wouldn’t crack with sudden hot and cold. And so I made a glass that was almost impervious to heat. I also made a glass that wouldn’t expand a great deal or shrink a great deal during the casting process. And when I got a glass the coefficients were exactly the same as the bronze, I had it made. Now, I took this project of the glass and bronze in ’62 to get my master’s degree. They said, ‘Well, if it doesn’t work out, you failed.’ And I said, ‘I don’t care. It’s my course. And I’m paying for it. And that’s what I want to do. And that’s my project.’ And I had the whole thing down and finished in three weeks. It’s a matter of applying what you know technically, your technical knowledge, and your knowledge of metals, your knowledge of glass, your knowledge of heat control, and putting them all together. It’s like a recipe for a pudding—a pie.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
You’ve got to do it right, or it’s no good. And this is in aluminum. And it’s much easier to work in aluminum and glass, because aluminum shrinks very little, and aluminum does not have to be poured at a very high heat.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
And so actually your success with aluminum and glass would be much easier to come by than bronze and glass. Now this one is over at The Glass Gallery, too, and this one is called Night Passage. And this one has a lot of flowers and weeds that I found in California embedded in the aluminum, so that I could bring back sort of a souvenir of weeds and flowers and seeds and pods from California, and it’s called Night Passage. This is at The Glass Gallery.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
This is one of the things that’s called Mother Lode, and I’m especially fond of this. And it is a vertical laminate of glass, in with the gold which represents the schist, or the part of the mine that you dig the gems out of, just like you find veins of gold or veins of jewels in a mine. This was the idea that—I called this Mother Lode, that loves precious things to be found in this mining operation.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
That’s another one of Mother Lode, and you can see the glass in there, and the textures in the bronze. You can get some wonderful textures in bronze. And bronze and glass makes a perfect marriage.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Here’s another picture of it. And you can see in the lower part of the bronze there what beautiful texture there is in the bronze. This one is over at The Glass Gallery, too.
[sound of slides advancing in projector]
Now this one is a little flower pattern that I made. This one is in a collection in Florida, and it’s in a museum. And it’s got opal glass, and then rose glass, coral glass, white opalescent glass, red glass, and some purple. And that is made very fragile and open. There’s a closer view of it. Now you can see the red part that’s towards the bottom—
[recording ends]