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Artists « Cam Langley
Cam Langley (Glass Work) Over the course of his career, Langley has created a rich body of work comprised of stunning floral arrangements and functional stemware and bowls. Langley follows Tiffany’s fixation with bringing the natural world into interior decorative and functional objects. Instead of having a beautifully crafted vase for fresh flowers, Langley forms both the vase and the flowers. He achieves radiating colors by combining rod-form glass sticks with molten clear glass. To add the smallest of details, he then applies powder colors (made from finely ground glass) as the piece if being blown. Langley’s passion for glass was piqued by the renowned glass collection at Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, located near where he grew up in Virginia. After working for a decade as a civil engineer, Langley opted to pursue a career in glass, learning his craft through studio visits with Harvey Littleton, a couple of summer sessions at Penland School of Crafts, and courses he took as a non-degree student at the University of Wisconsin. Langley enjoys creating bouquets of bursting flowers and stalks of leaves—all perfectly balanced in their vase—and has a deceptively simple sounding creative philosophy: “With the bouquets, I try to change both the forms of the flowers and the mix of flowers. I like to select different floral forms for each bouquet so each composition is an individual, unique sculpture. A number of possibilities exist, depending on the selection of the flower, its color, and the number of flowers and stems grouped together. Most of my work is totally experimental.” Langley is recognized as part of the Studio Glass movement. Studio glassmaking is defined by the efforts of a single individual or a small group of artists to determine the design of an object and complete the execution of it. In the 1960s, technical advances in glassmaking allowed artists to work alone at a modest glass furnace, which thus permitted shifting production from a sizeable factory setting with numerous assistants to a studio setting. The movement began in Toledo, Ohio, where Langley’s mentor Harvey Littleton (b. 1922), a ceramic artist, held two glassblowing workshops in the spring and summer of 1962. Littleton was the son of the director of research at Toledo’s Corning Glass Works, and Littleton combined his father’s research with both his own experiments and what he learned of Italian glassblowing techniques. After formulating a successful approach to creating a small-scale studio furnace, Littleton and partner Dominick Labino (1910-87) decided to share their knowledge and techniques with other artists. Cam Langley was one of those artists. , Items in the APT AuctionRelated Linkshttp://www.mmfa.org/exhibitions.aspx?id=226http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Littleton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_glass_movement#The_international_studio_glass_movement |
