Dale Chihuly Essay

When it comes to art made from glass no one stands out more than Dale Chihuly. His art stands out for not only the dazzling design, but also for the aura that it emits. Several people have attempted to describe his work however few have succeeded in their endeavor. For this paper, I am going to look at Linda Norden’s description of Chihuly’s work, a video interview of Chihuly, as well as an article from Clement Greenberg for comparison. From these, one prominent writer, Linda Norden, evaluated Chihuly’s art and argued that his forms extend from nature. She does this by first discussing how his art draws insipiration from the Art Nouveau style. This style is noted for having characteristics such as linear lines and curves that are based on …show more content…
She feels that this series demonstrates his love of marvel and discovery and his intuition for forms. In her opinion, Chihuly’s basket forms are his only series that contain these aspects. With this I disagree. For the video interview, I watched the clip titled Chihuly Garden Cycle. In the video Chihuly discusses setting up the Garfield Park Conservatorium in Chicago. He describes this as “one of the most thrilling exhibitions he has ever installed”. This highlights the sense of marvel and discovery that he felt from this exhibition. In addition to this, in the video he talks about how he feels that an artist knows on when they hit on something and that unless they have that feeling they can’t go on. He also states that, “you can do a lot of things here that you can’t in a museum’. From both of these things, Chihuly’s intuition for forms are expressed. Furthermore, he describes the conservatirium as another world. This gives light to the abstract nature of it as it is not of typical qualities associated with a conservatorium. Each of these aspects demonstrate how it is more than just the basket series where the traits generally described as an abstract, expressive formal language are