|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Uncontradictable Dan Dailey
| Article
# : |
20165 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
1,529 Words |
| Author
: |
Karen S. Chambers
Karen S. Chambers is a craft writer, critic, and curator
currently based in New York. |
The smooth surface of the graceful, two-foot-high, blown-glass vase has been sandblasted to create a stylized face composed of leaves and branches: Vine Woman by Dan Dailey. The frosted glass bottle, decorated with a brightly enameled townscape, abstracted to the essential, alludes to Italy with its Etruscan-inspired shape and classical architecture: Monumenti by Dan Dailey, in collaboration with Italian glassblowing genius Lino Tagliapietra. A crisply geometricized figure of sheet metal grasps a corn-lime stalk and balanced a glowing basket (a marigold-colored glass vessel) on its head: Farmer, a lamp, by Dan Dailey.
Slick colored Vitrolite silhouettes are held together by zinc- and gold-plated screws to create Odd Duck, a hard-edged, futuristic, circa 1930s rendition of a waterfowl from the Animal Cliché Series by Dan Dailey. The Letter tells its story clearly: a woman, a letter, a glass of wine, and a half-eaten candy bar: It's a wall relief of colored sheet glass cut into simple geometric forms and straightforwardly but elegantly bolted together by Dan Dailey.
In a cast-glass window for the Newburyport, New Hampshire, courthouse, significant details hide among the ten-foot-high blades of grass; some tell the history of the whaling and fishing community (a ship in a bottle, a teacup for the China trade, a sailor's hat), but there is also a Frankenstein and a Miro guitar, all intended to engage, amuse, and ease the anxious waiting of courtroom denizens. Cast in a West Virginia glass factory, it was designed by Dan Dailey.
This is merely a sampling of some of the work that glass artist Dan Dailey has done, more or less concurrently, in the last several years. Such diversity has been a constant in his career. In 1979, Dailey recognized that this apparent jumping from one type of work to another was his aesthetic modus operandi: "I think it's important to just keep making things instead of getting stuck on one thing and smothering it, just working it to death . . . If you stay too long on one thing, it doesn't work."
But despite the seeming variety in his work, there is a remarkable consistency. It is not that it is all glass--for glass, unlike other mediums, can be worked in many different ways to create wildly disparate effects. And although most artists stick to one technique, Dailey uses many. He is as likely to direct a master glassblower in creating vessel forms that he then embellishes by sandblasting or painting as he is to cut and assemble sheets of commercially available glass into tabletop sculptures and wall
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
