Stephen Rolfe Powell - Studio Art Glass

Tenacious Purple Lick

Kissy Fally Giverney

Snoop Grapey Grape

Stephen Powell is one of the leading glass artists in the world. His superlative vessels, with their lavish colors, voluptuous shapes and descriptive titles, invoke a chin-to-the-floor response and then invite you to take a closer look, as if a friendship was forming between you and the vessel. Powell has established a name for himself in the contemporary glass movement with exhibitions throughout the United States, Paris and Hamburg. He is the only American glass artist whose work is represented in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Through an evocative Rothko-like use of abstract colour fields and a sensual vessel format, his works explore the fragile boundaries of creation: artistic, sexual, divine, cosmic and mythic.

Much of Powell's fascination with the act of creation is driven by a spiritual bond with Nature and fire. As a direct descendant of the Native American priestess Pocahontas, Powell seems to draw his energies and references intuitively from Nature and the surrounding landscape of his farm. His radiant swelling vessels find easy parallels in the geological stratifications of exposed cliffs and riverbeds, the orbiting planets, the pregnant bellies of Native American pots and baskets, and the bulging bodies of prehistoric fertility goddesses. It is not, however, the symbols of creation that preoccupy Powell but the intense act of creation itself.

Just as fire is central to Powell's conception of creation, so is colour. He regards colour as the most important element in his vessels because it has the same expressive ability as fire to evoke, to shock, and to transform. Since he began working in the late 1970's, first as a painter and ceramist, then exclusively in glass after 1984, Powell has tried to incorporate the radical colour aesthetics of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism into his art. Between 1984 and 1988, he was most inspired by the "action painting" of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. As both he and his work have matured, he is greatly influenced by and identifies with the theory and philosophy of colour field artist, Mark Rothko. After a visit to the Rothko Chapel at St. Thomas University, Houston, Texas, Powell's work took on a new turn. He experienced a strong empathy with the aims of the artist and a total frustration with the inadequacy of paint to convey emotion through colour. Glass seemed like the logical alternative to painting and ceramics. Powell often ponders whether Rothko would have committed suicide if he had considered the expressive potential of colored glass. It is the raw energy, radiant colour and spiritual essence of Rothko's paintings that Powell pumps into his giant universes. His aim is not to produce "abstract designs" but to evoke basic human emotions. Colour is a tool to achieve that.

Born in 1951 in Birmingham, Alabama, Powell grew up in the shadow of the city's monument to the steel industry, a 54 meter-tall statue of the Roman mythological fire god, Vulcan. He attended Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, where he received his BA in painting in 1974. After a brief stint in teaching, he entered graduate school at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, receiving his MFA in ceramics in 1983. Although his focus was on the fire-intense process of raku pottery, by 1984, Powell was hooked on glass, after a brief introduction to the medium.

Through the years, Powell has had the opportunity to work closely with such diverse glass artists as William Morris, Marvin Lipovsky and Dante Marioni. By 1985, he had already acquired sufficient expertise and reputation to assist Dan Dailey and Lino Tagliapietra at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington. The creative atmosphere which prevails in the Pilchuck environment encouraged him to apply his color aesthetics to the glass medium. Later that year, Corning's New Glass Review affirmed Powell's coloristic experiments when it featured three of his vessels as the work of an up-and-coming artist.

Powell's early works were generally small vividly colored vessels with constrastingly bright horizontal stripes or wrappings of molten glass. These were the works that were meant to emulate the spontaneity and physicality of "action painters" Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The vessel form became a crucial component in his work at this time, one he has continued to work with. The shape appeals to Powell because it is the oldest significant glass form, dating back to the early Phoenicians, serving utilitarian and ceremonial purposes.

His work changed dramatically in 1988 with the introduction of Murrini. Essentially, Powell created a long strand or cane of glass of concentric colors. When you look into the cross section of the rod of glass, you are see a bull's-eye pattern. Each rod is cut into slivers, which are then placed on the surface of the glass. This increased the variety and created tension between colors. By doing this, he explored the relationships and effects of the multicolored bands while at the same time, building visual tension on the surface by the shapes of the murrini and the texture they create. As the effects were successful, he began creating more complicated murrini, combining opaque and translucent glass into one cane. The results are breathtaking.

The second most important factor that changed his art was his acceptance to teach and to study at the Muhkina Glass Institute in Leningrad and at the Lvov Glass Factory and Art Institute in the Ukraine. Powell is honored as the first American ever allowed to enter the glass factories in the USSR. Their methods of production varied dramatically from what Powell was accustomed to. In the Soviet, there was a conscious division between an "artist" who generated designs and "technicians" who executed the piece. From this he recognized the necessity of a direct, "hands-on" approach in his own work, that imparts traces of his physical presence as well as embodying the mental acts by which a work is conceived.

Since returning home, Powell's works have more than doubled in size. He works with a team of four or five glass artists or technicians. With their help, and by adapting a new philosophy, Powell was able to overcome the boundaries he had previously imposed on himself. Refining shape and color so that the shapes allow for more light to filter through, gaining more optical results. The pieces now contain 3000 murrini, with no two vessels ever alike. The color palettes vary dramatically from one piece to the next: vibrant jewel tones, to earthy shades, to everything in between. It is in these changes, along with an almost painterly manipulation of light and color, that Powell successfully merges the power and the luminosity of glass with the colour aesthetic of the Abstract Expressionists. Although the recent trend in the glass studio movement is the crossover between glass and sculpture, Powell has bridged the gap between the traditional color aesthetics of painting and the traditional sensibilities of glass.

For Powell, it is still the creative process that is most important, the act of taking a gather of hot, liquid, molten glass and transforming it into a unique visual image of light and color. The carefully choreographed dance of manipulation of fire and other elements leaves him exhausted and exhilarated and ready to begin the next piece.

Stephen Powell, the process...

Glass blowing is a team effort, with Powell as the head gaffer directing every facet of the process. A single vessel requires eight separate gathers of hot, molten glass. It is a process that takes many hours and countless trips to the marvering table and glory hole. Powell babies each gather, relentlessly shaping and compressing it until the mass weighs over 30 pounds. It takes a minimum of three assistants to keep the blowtorches going, to protect Powell's skin from the intense heat, and help give direction to the shaping.

To make a gather: Powell has a furnace of hot molten clear glass. A blowpipe is typically 5 feet long. The end of the blowpipe is placed into the furnace, picking up a bundle of glass. The bundle is then rolled over a special table, called a marvering table. This table is spotlessly clean and can handle the heat of the glass, while at the same time, it does not cool the glass while being manipulated on its surface. The glory hole is like a warming station. It looks similar to a furnace, but glass is not stored inside. Its purpose is to create an environment where a gather of glass can be reheated to working temperature. This is important because glass can cool quickly while it is being manipulated. Therefore, the artist must return to the glory hole numerous times during the process to keep the gather of glass to the proper temperature.

In Powell's vessels, color is applied with murrini, small disks of concentric color. The largest vessels require over 3,000 murrini. The murrini are designed and made by Stephen in advance. Basically Powell creates a rod or cane of glass. Typically two or more colors are laid out in concentric circles. It starts out as a round gather of glass. Color is applied to the outer layer, it is reheated until the colors fuse together. The next layer of color is then applied, heated, fused, and the process repeated until Powell is satisfied. Bear in mind, the glass is still basically a ball of hot firey glass. Once the colors are in place, Stephen then pulls the glass into a long thin rod of glass. The rod is annealed, and then sliced into small disk-shaped pieces. They are laid out in a predetermined pattern on a warming bed. This process alone can take many days or even weeks, depending on the complexity of the patterns Powell is creating.

On the day of the "blow", the murrini are heated to about 800 degrees. Meanwhile, Powell has been building his gather of glass. Once the gather is prepared, it is rolled over the bed of hot murrini, whereby the murrini stick to the gather. The gather is reheated in the glory hole, fusing the murrini to the gather. Once the gather is ready, Stephen climbs on top of a scaffold, positioning himself as rapidly as possible as the weight and mass of the glass begin to exert their downward influence. With expertly timed puffs of air, and gravity doing much of the work, the vessel stretches and flows into the tubular form resting on the floor, creating the slender neck, the murrini stretch, creating the bulbous body. Although Powell can, after years' experience, predict some of the outcomes, and hope for certain effects, each vessel is unique and the final result remains a mystery until its 72-hour annealing period is completed.

Annealing: The finished glass is still very hot, usually around 1000 degrees. The temperature is gradually reduced to room temperature in an annealing oven or kiln. This allows the glass molecules to realign into proper order.