Collaborating is the key to so much success in the world. And not collaborating is the key to so much strife. Still musing over the visit to Seattle and the glass artist community and with so many highlights and learning experiences it is hard to pick one, but a visit with Paul Marioni was a true and unusual treat. This father of glass art, and the literal father of Dante Marioni, had us all into his small two room apartment/studio and stood sharing philosophy, stories and the history of the glass art movement in the world, and particularly in Seattle and Pilchuck, the first real collaborative workshop setting for contemporary glass art.

Paul had several messages, but the main one was that the collaborative nature of the movement had Lino Tagliapietra (http://www.linotagliapietra.com/) come early to Pilchuck (http://www.pilchuck.com/default.htm) to teach the Venetian technique to a bunch of hot glass enthusiasts who were self taught. The magic in the movement is that the entire movement is still mostly collaborative. You see making hot glass art has to be collaborative as the process involves several people, and to achieve the end result, collaboration is necessary.

Making things work best is the result of lots of good thoughts and processes coming together. Strategic marketing is also that collaborative process with PR, design and marketing strategy all coming together to be better at the end than one of the three.

For more on the Marionis, read below or go to: (http://www.marxsaunders.com/guide/featured.image.index.ihtml?step=2&startnum=1&maxvalue=9&c=14&an=Dante%20Marioni&o=1&increment=9)

“Born to a family of artists, Dante Marioni was raised by his father, Paul Marioni, a rebel intellectual who is one of the pioneers of the American studio glass movement. Few might suspect that an artist like Paul Marioni, who tried to lose history in the search for innovation in glass, would produce a son devoted to preserving the craft of glass blowing as it has been practiced for centuries. But Dante Marioni is not so unlike his father as one might imagine. Like his father, Marioni is self-aware, observant, and intellectually confident, and while it is true that his aesthetic sensibilities reflect a classical, historical, and traditional canon of beauty, the only thing conservative and tradition-bound about Dante Marioni is his method. “

Tina Oldknow, curator Corning Glass Musseum

“Dante Marioni’s career embodies the central concept of the Italian workshop tradition, to respect your elders, listen and observe, work collectively and collegially, and, when your moment comes, to take all you have learned and make it your own, your unique contribution to the history of your medium. This Marioni does with such assuredness and grace as to make his vision seem inevitable, the perfect conjuncture of skill and perception, acknowledging a rich legacy while creating a world of his own. He is heir and innovator, and the sheer beauty of his vessels both gesture to an honored past and point the way forward to where that tradition may lead. Of course, Marioni’s great technical talents provide him the means to work this magic, and the sheer bravura performance of his manipulation of glass is wonderful to witness. He naturally drifts toward, as Italians put it, difficulta, a kind of testing of his skills, a brinkmanship that stimulates his energies, giving him new challenges to solve. Part of his pleasure in the work, one senses, is in the performative aspect of glassblowing, in the risky moments of getting it right, in that crucial instant where a piece will work or fall apart.

But let’s broaden the context of what is Italian about this most American artist. The artists that leap to mind when experiencing his work can be Tintoretto and Veronese as much as they ever are Tagliapietra or Venini, the Italian nature with which Marioni is imbued extends far beyond the medium of glass. Take, for example, one of Marioni’s wonderful Trio ensembles-they’re like a Holy Family in three vessels, a little sacra conversazione in colored glass. I never see one of his impossibly elongated pitchers, its slender elegance arcing upwards, always upwards, seemingly farther than a neck can go, without thinking of Parmagianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck, with a slimness, a grazia, that is almost musical in its rhythm. This interplay between the vessel and the human form is not unique to Marioni, but it is rarely so, well, bella, so well proportioned and judicious. One of the touchstones of Italian and classical art is its pursuit of the ideal rather than the real, the search for an exemplar that resides somehow perfect in the mind rather than in the stuff of the world around us. You may know that old tale about Raphael, that when he was asked to paint a beautiful woman he decided to look at many beautiful women, so he could combine in one image the very best parts of each. That seems close to Marioni’s way, in form and in color his vessels appear heightened to some core concept, some purified condensation of their essence. These sculptures, sensual and seductive, subtle and sinuous, celebrate beauty as an end in itself, providing us an aperture to visual pleasure and satisfaction that little else does. That long American tradition, acknowledging a European language while giving it a dramatic New World accent, is particularly intriguingly bridged in Marioni’s work, and is a tribute to both. “

James Yood
James Yood teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago