David Levi
draws inspiration from the massive ceramic amphorae made by the Greeks,
Romans and other ancient civilizations. His pieces represent his contemporary
re-interpretation of some of the most ancient functional objects.
Each piece is blown freely by Levi, without molds.
Levi has taught
at some of America's premier glass schools, including Pilchuck Glass
School, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School of Crafts
and the Pratt School of Art, to name a few. Levi's work has been published
worldwide, and has been shown at major museums and exhibitions. His
pieces are among the permanent collections of the Renwick Museum of
the Smithsonian, Corning Museum of Glass, the American Craft Museum,
plus many more.
He got into the
crafts "business" to support his glass blowing habit ... who knew he might
actually like it?
TCR:
How did you first become interested in working with glass, and how did
your work evolve from where it started to the work you create today?
LB:Some
people can't walk past the glow of a furnace without stopping. Most
people do, but me, I've been fascinated since I was a kid. The old black
and white newsreels with Bessemer furnaces dumping gigantic crucibles
of molten steel, white sparks almost obliterating the scene, and workers
in coveralls all casual - I still can't take my eyes off this kind of
thing. So, as far as when I got my start, on some level I think it's
organic, my genes have selected over a million generations, I'm way
at the end of the "hot molten stuff rules!" curve.
My
college had a small glass program. It was experimental and primitive,
and the things the students made were clumsy, so it didn't initially
hold my interest for very long. By this time I'd been turned on to painting
and architecture and design, and it wasn't until I had a chance to watch
a tight, professional, highly skilled team working (Benjamin Moore,
recently back from training in Murano, Italy, and Richard Royal, with
a large crew, working for Dale Chihuly ... Joan Jett had a hit on the
radio, "I Love Rock and Roll," maybe 1982?) that I realized some very
cool stuff can be made this way. Then it was like slipping into a hot
bath. Not that it's always been comfortable, but since then I've never
found anything that made me want to get out.
TCR:
How have you pursued your career in glass?
LB:
I've always liked drawing and painting, and then in high school, I discovered
ceramics. When I found out about glass blowing, I went after it. To
say I pursued a career sounds misleading, because it implies some sense
of a future, and at the time, I was pretty certain that making a living
at it was out of the question. It's more like one thing led to another.
I was obsessed with the craft, and the desire to make cool things, and
now, almost 20 years later, married, with three kids and a mortgage,
I'm somehow still doing it.
So here are some
of the milestones on my path:
In 1984, when I
graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a BFA, I was hired
by the John Heron School of Art in Indianapolis, Ind., to be their glass
artist in residence. On a budget of $1,500, and some random materials
(and natural gas) from the ceramics department, I built a glass shop,
taught workshops for 10 weeks, and had a show at the gallery at the end.
They put out a flyer with a grainy picture of some old factory glassworker
with my name under it, listed as "Master Glassblower." After just over
a year of blowing, this was an absurd misrepresentation, but in the land
of the blind, I was King. I figured we're all just making it up as we
go along anyway, and no one ever caught on.
I left Indiana for
Transjo, Sweden, to apprentice with Jan-Erik Rizman and Svenne Carlson,
two glassblowers that left the Kosta Boda factory to start a shop with
artist/designer Ann Wolff. I learned a huge amount about glass, and the
Swedish approach to it. There's a long tradition that starts with the
notion that glass, the material, is a fantastic thing. It goes from there.
I also discovered that when Jan-Erik said we were going on safari, in
February, it meant loading sausages, ice drills, kids and apprentices,
into the bucket of his backhoe, and driving to the middle of the lake
to see if the wildlife was biting. Jan-Erik remains a mentor to me. He's
not only a natural talent at the bench, but he also manages to integrate
relationships, work and fun in a way that seems to me the best inspiration
for what the life of a craftsperson can be.
In 1985, I joined
my friends Dimitri Michaelides and Sam Stang to start IBEX Glass Studio
in St. Louis, our hometown. We chose the name partly because it had
the virtue of not giving away what kind of shop it was, which was useful,
because we initially had no idea where we were going with it.
We worked together
for seven years. A lot of the work that I'm doing now began during this
time. It was a very intense creative collaboration, with all important
decisions made by consensus, and the majority of pieces signed jointly
as well. We did the Baltimore ACC [American Craft Council] show the
first year, and partly because the work was seriously underpriced, made
something of a splash. We showed a cohesive collection of "designy"
pieces, simple, mostly geometric, bright colors, somewhat Memphis-inspired,
at a time when the scene was dominated by the influence of Tiffany and
the experimental American school of dip-and-blow. During the gala preview
evening before the show started, while Joan Mondale was giving the opening
speech, we sold out of most of our year's production, and the rest the
following morning. I wouldn't necessarily recommend underpricing as
a marketing strategy. But it instantly connected us with a significant
market.
Dimitri and I started
doing sculptural pieces together that landed us with some gallery shows,
and some recognition that included sharing an NEA Grant in 1988. We began
making pieces with birds on the handles of large vases, with richly textured
and colored, multilayered, baroque surfaces.
In 1993, Sam, Dimitri
and I dissolved our partnership, with me retaining IBEX. I moved to Seattle
with my wife and, then, two children and did a three-month design stint
at the Glass Eye Studio, a production glass factory in town, to ease the
transition.
In
1994, we moved to Whidbey Island, Wash. We bought property, moved an old
farmhouse onto it, and I now commute 70 feet to my shop, which used to be
an enormous chicken barn. Sometimes I have visitors who have lived in Transjo,
and sometimes they comment that in some ways my situation resembles Jan-Erik's.
I take this as the biggest compliment a person could get.
TCR:
Who is the market for your work? What is your strategy for reaching them?
LB:
Like everyone else, I have some idiosyncratic notions of what is good
and beautiful, and the messages that glass can convey, and I imagine
my market to be the people who agree. I'm not sure who these people
are, or the best way to locate them, and I'm always plagued by the idea
that there is, in fact, a club of these people, with possibly a newsletter
and potluck dinners, that I've been kept in the dark about. In the meantime,
I've continued showing high-end pieces at a handful of galleries, whom
I've connected with in various haphazard ways, and I still do the Baltimore
wholesale show most years with my production line. I've had a primitive
site online for a year now, which I am in the process of developing
as a more focused marketing tool. People do stumble onto it occasionally,
and I have made contacts this way, so I'm quite optimistic that this
effort will lead to something.
TCR:
Besides being featured in museums and major collections, where do you
make the bulk of your sales?
LB:I
used to hear about when the wholesale markets started: outdoor shows,
pig roasts, the herb haze, pottery on picnic tables, seat-of-the-pants
kind of stuff. Things have gotten very professional since then. Slick
booth setups, quarterly earnings projections, a phenomenal increase
in skill and quality, and huge growth in the number of participants.
Glass has become very popular, partly because of how vividly the story
has been told, but it has also become, in terms of the market, very
competitive. The high cost of building and running a shop makes it a
hard business to launch and maintain, and makes R&D a very expensive
proposition.
All this shifts
the emphasis from the reason most people get into it to begin with,
which is exploring an amazing medium, to working the angles. Not that
this is entirely a bad thing. I always had an aesthetic distaste for
the business of business, but along the way, I've met people who make
business a great thing. Some people are better than others when it comes
to creating a situation where people like to be, treating people right,
where there is a sense of goals and opportunities, and the coffee maker
works. For me it's been an eye opener to recognize that having a business
isn't just a means to support my artistic habits, it requires a whole
set of skills and attitudes very different from what you learn in art
school, and if you do it right, it's a noble endeavor.
TCR:
How has the Internet affected your business? You mentioned you were
planning to expand your Web site in the near future ... can you talk
about what you're planning to do and how you intend to use your site?
LB:I'm
a fairly recent convert to the Internet; I just bought a computer for
the first time a couple of years ago. Besides the obvious: e-mail, sourcing,
etc., it's been very useful in sending images of pieces to galleries
and potential customers.
I'm working on
the Web site with a designer friend, who assures me it will be effective
in targeting the specific audiences I'm trying to reach, and having
a professional window to present myself to the world. In particular,
I'm going to try to use it to introduce new directions I'm looking to
pursue, specifically illuminated sculpture and lighting.
ONLINE
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW:
David
Levi•
Glass Artist