Ten Circles: Dante Marioni, Sam Andreakos, Bullseye Glass

TEN CIRCLES DANTE MARIONI SAM ANDREAKOS BULLSEYE GLASS

TEN CIRCLES DANTE MARIONI SAM ANDREAKOS BULLSEYE GLASS

published in conjunction with Dante’s Tenth Circle NOVEMBER 27 - 28, 2004

TEN CIRCLES: A DECADE OF CELEBRATING GLASS

We’ve been running in circles for ten years. It started in 1995. My partner Dan and I wanted to celebrate Bullseye’s latest adventure, the opening of a glassworking Resource Center called the Bullseye Connection. Not that the Resource Center has much to do with glassblowing – we’re more typically working with the methods called kilnglass – but we knew we’d have a hard time gathering crowds to watch the programming of a kiln. And since celebrations need company we decided on a glassblowing party.

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Of the stars in the galaxy of glass, Dante Marioni is what many would call a Supergiant, not simply for his remarkable technical skill, but for all that he brings to the territory: an unpretentious good humor that overlays impressive art world credentials and – most importantly for us – a willingness to come to the aid of his friends.

So we asked Dante if he’d celebrate glass with us once a year, every year, in Portland, at Thanksgiving, with a demonstration of great blowing.

In turn, Dante asked his friends, Janusz Pozniak and Paul Cunningham, both exceptional blowers and artists in their own right, to join him. It’s been ten years of good fun that concludes this year, 2004, with this small catalog tribute to the people and the material who shine at the center of our glass universe.

While imposing on Dante and Friends to dazzle us with their blowing skills, we’ve also annually forced Sam Andreakos, our head glass technologist, to cook up a new and unusual batch or two of glass. As agreeable, as passionate, and as unassuming as Dante, Sam has repeatedly obliged with new recipes for increasingly unusual glasses.

For both Dante and Sam, these events have been “exercises.” For Dante, who normally works in a much larger scale, cups are a way to keep his skills tuned – not a commercial venture. For Sam, the Dante Circles have been an opportunity to exercise his knowledge of glass formulation in areas beyond the daily factory production. For us, Sam and Dante represent the twin components of the art of glass: exceptional material and great forming skill.

While talking to both of them about the last ten years, I asked about their own heroes, people or things that had inspired them. Sam had a litany of books (Volf, Weyl), and the daily taunting of nature as he walked from his home to the factory (“Bet you can’t make a fuschia as rich as me!”).

Dante’s inspiration for the cup exercise was even more specific: “Lino Tagliapietra - I saw him blow glass in 1983 and everything changed completely for me.” One simple, elegant goblet that Lino made and Dante acquired at age 19 (pictured left) sits today in a place of honor in Dante’s home. “It was like $80 or something – at the time that was a week of hard work, but it made a huge difference to a kid like me.” In this interconnected glass universe, the stars too have stars.

Finally, this catalog is itself an exercise: an effort to capture in words and pictures what the Dante Circles have been for us at Bullseye.

Anyone familiar with the original Circles of Dante Alighieri’s fiery landscape will have noticed that we exceeded the tally by one. If the punishments truly do fit the crime, we and those who also love glass will spend eternity running in circles around these infernal cauldrons with the talents who coax from them such remarkable color and form.

Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Dante.

Lani McGregor

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR The Bullseye Connection November 2004

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Filo a thread of glass wrapped around any part of the cup, whether at the lip, around the bowl, stem or foot

Bevante the bowl of the cup

Mezza stampaura or mezza stampatura ribbed effect on the bottom part of the bowl achieved by blowing it into a mold

Avolio a spool shaped piece of glass between the bowl and stem or between the stem and foot

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Gambo the stem

Pie or piede the foot

TEN CIRCLES DANTE MARIONI • SAM ANDREAKOS BULLSEYE GLASS

1995

THE FIRST CIRCLE Crystal Clear

1996

THE SECOND CIRCLE Venetian Topaz Wannabe

1997

THE THIRD CIRCLE Rare Earth Duet (Praseodymium & Neodymium)

1998

THE FOURTH CIRCLE Tintoretto Selenium Coral

1999

THE FIFTH CIRCLE Tuxedo: Black & White

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2000

THE SIXTH CIRCLE Chandelier Cobalt

2001

THE SEVENTH CIRCLE Fluorescent Kawasaki

2002

THE EIGHTH CIRCLE Sunrise Selenium Orange & Pagliesco

2003

THE NINTH CIRCLE Slately Navy & Olively Ochre

2004

THE TENTH CIRCLE Yolk Yellow & Zelig

1 THE FIRST CIRCLE 1995 Crystal Clear Where else to start but with clear glass? For the First Circle we asked Sam to mix up a non-lead crystal clear low-iron glass. We asked Dante to just show Portland how a team of good glassblowers might form it.

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SAM ANDREAKOS One of the most elusive things over the centuries has been to make a clear clearer. It all comes down to the purity of the raw materials – not just the sand, although, since it makes up 60-70% of the mix, it’s the most important. But even trace elements that you might think have nothing to do with the color, can react with other trace elements to brown up the glass. Then there’s the contamination that can come from almost anywhere. A really clear clear only looks easy from the outside.

DANTE MARIONI I started making goblets when I was in high school. It may sound weird, but I was pretty much the first American to start doing it. All the great glassblowers were busy making artwork. But I threw myself into making cups.

Now it’s something that everybody does. It’s like a teapot to the ceramists.

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2 THE SECOND CIRCLE 1996 Venetian Topaz Wannabe We’ve never been sure how we ended up with this color.

We think that Dante wanted us to make a light strawcolored traditional Venetian glass called pagliesco, but he was afraid we wouldn’t understand the word. So he called it topaz. It turned out lots darker than he expected.

Later he told us he really liked it. But Dante’s always a gentleman, so who really knows.

SAM ANDREAKOS

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As far as what the literature would say – and I was looking at Weyl1 - a real topaz would be a selenium and lead, but we were trying to do glasses that were lead-free, so we replicated the color using nickel as the primary colorant. That glass, quite honestly, was fairly simple compared to things we did as the years went on.

1Weyl, Woldemar A. Coloured Glasses. Sheffield, England: Society

of Glass Technology, 1951.

DANTE MARIONI I learned how to make a perfect bevante - the actual volume of the cup - before I learned how to make the avolio or the stem or the foot. It’s different now. Everybody gets all that information straight away. You’ll never learn to make good cups if you try to do it all at once.

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3 THE THIRD CIRCLE 1997 Rare Earth Duet: Praseodymium (rhubarb shift) and Neodymium (lavender) Rare earth glasses are pretty exotic. The “neo” shifts from a blue to lavender and the “praseo” can be either green or slightly cherry depending on the light source.

We used the Dante blow to experiment with the colors that later went into Bullseye’s sheet and casting glass production lines.

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SAM ANDREAKOS In spite of their name, “rare earths” are some of the more abundant metals in the earth’s crust. The problem is that they are found together in the same deposits and on a molecular level they are so similar to each other that it’s very difficult to separate them. It wasn’t until more modern times that we had the more sophisticated processes like fractional distillation to separate them. That’s why they’re so expensive.

DANTE MARIONI An important thing to remember about the wine glass is that it’s something you can do a lot of very quickly in a given glassblowing session. You can work through things. If you just concentrate on making large stuff, your progress is going to be slower.

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4 THE FOURTH CIRCLE 1998 Tintoretto Selenium Coral It must have been a Martha Stewart moment that inspired us to mix up a bunch of pomegranate juice and Prosecco, into “Tintorettos” - drinks that reminded us of Harry’s Bar in Venice. We made Bellinis too - with peach juice to match the color of the “pagliesco” glass we’d melted. The alcohol came in handy when that second color turned out to be depressingly un-blowable.

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SAM ANDREAKOS With selenium glasses [the “Tintoretto”] you’ve always got to look at the trace metals, especially the iron – that’s what browns up the color. So you play with the iron to shift the color from pink to more of a bronze. Then you add arsenic to stabilize the selenium.

DANTE MARIONI I look at [making cups] a little bit like ordering up a burrito at this Mexican restaurant that we go to sometimes.

They’ve got a giant list of ingredients up on the menu board and you just pick out a bit of this or a bit of that, …like choosing an avolio, a particular foot, a certain stem…you put them all together and you’ve got something that’s different from everyone else’s but still using all the same ingredients.

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5 THE FIFTH CIRCLE 1999 Tuxedo: Black and White By the fifth year we knew that if we were going to melt experimental glasses, we’d better do two in order to have a back up. Sure enough, someone didn’t realize that the white needed a lower annealing temperature than our lower expansion glasses and we ended up with a bunch of wilted white cups after the first day.

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SAM ANDREAKOS God bless the internet – that’s were I found an old recipe for Sabino glass that I used as the starting point for that striking white phosphate opal. The black was a striking color too. It was really clear when it came out of the furnace – which made it nice for Dante to be able to see any imperfections in the original gather. Then the color struck and it was a nice, crisp black.

DANTE MARIONI Like my personal artwork, the cups for me are about beauty. And for me that means form. It’s also always been about craftsmanship, about the line, simple and plainly done.

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6 THE SIXTH CIRCLE 2000 Chandelier Cobalt We’d always loved the fact that once, when asked to design a chandelier, Dante had made one completely out of cups [he did it in 1999 for the Broadway Building in Tacoma, Washington]. We asked him to do something similar for us. In blue. It came complete with spare cups.

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SAM ANDREAKOS This blue was a more complex glass than it might look at first glace. It was a cobalt, chrome, nickel – we’d developed the color originally while we were working with Narcissus Quagliata on a palette of deeper blues for his museum wall “Gateway into Night.”

DANTE MARIONI The work that I make is about glassblowing. It’s not about the work of primitive cultures or people traveling to other worlds or any of the different themes that I’ve been exposed to. It’s about designers like Tapio Wirkkala, it’s about looking in books and seeing forms and maybe updating things…I approach it from a design point of view.

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7 THE SEVENTH CIRCLE 2001 Fluorescent Kawasaki By the seventh year we were looking at our wall of cups from past Circles and starting to think about how the colors worked together. A bright yellowy green seemed like a good match with the previous year’s cobalt. And we’ve always thought of Dante as a Kawasaki kind of guy.

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SAM ANDREAKOS We make a spring green that’s similar to this, but it’s a cadmium/chrome glass. Since we didn’t want the yellow component to strike or opalize we eliminated the cadmium and made instead a cerium/titanium/chrome.

DANTE MARIONI Early on Lino said to me “If you make goblets for seven years, you can make anything.” And I took it to heart, more figuratively than literally. I thought that was a really interesting thing to hear when I was a kid.

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8 THE EIGHTH CIRCLE 2002 Sunrise Selenium Orange & Pagliesco By the eighth year we were ready to try the elusive Pagliesco glass again. This time it worked. I wished we’d had some Bellinis around to toast Sam’s success, but a little tequila with the Sunrise Selenium wasn’t a bad back up.

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SAM ANDREAKOS With the striking cadmium/selenium/sulfide glass, depending on the heat history – how Dante worked it in the flame – it could vary from being clear with a pale hint of yellow all the way into deep orange. The pagliesco was a glass that we’d come back to after a failed attempt in the fourth year. It ended up basically a sulfur that was modified with a little chrome and a little iron.

DANTE MARIONI The stem is really important. Janusz [Pozniak] does that.

He has to make a perfect stem. I only make wine glasses with Janusz. I don’t even like to do it when I travel. If ‘Nuszie’s not with me, I just don’t bother.

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9 THE NINTH CIRCLE 2003 Slately Navy & Olively Ochre Glass is a team sport. That’s obvious, of course, in watching a good team of blowers. But the same is true of the team that formulates, mixes and melts the glass. Everyone wants to be on a winning team. In the ninth year the Marketing Department ran onto the field with their contribution: two silly glass names.

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SAM ANDREAKOS These were the most complex of all the glasses we’d ever done, just for the number of colorants. The real challenge here is understanding which of the colorants are linear and which are exponential. With some colors, you can double the colorant and get double the saturation. With others you get to a point where adding more colorant does nothing to affect the saturation. And with some colors, if the color gets too intense, it can start transmitting in a different wavelength and go from a blue to a red, for instance.

DANTE MARIONI The cups are exercises. The project that we’ve done down at Bullseye has been about experimenting. It’s about trying to create some beauty from this alreadybeautiful material. It’s about a lot of different things that aren’t just a replica of a Venetian goblet. I’m conscious of trying to bring a little creativity to something that is basically the same ingredients that everyone works with.

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10 THE TENTH CIRCLE 2004 Yolk Yellow & Zelig ...Y, Z seemed like the place to end. We were hoping not to end up with egg on our face with the most complicated glass yet: a uranium/gold that we renamed “Zelig” for the chameleon Woody Allen character. The “egg yolk yellow” was Dante’s request. In ten years he’d never asked for a specific color, always wanting to leave it up to Sam’s creativity. On the way out he said simply “I’ve always liked yellow.”

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SAM ANDREAKOS The “Zelig” formula is one that harkens back to a glass popular at the turn of the last century. Uranium gives a pretty stable yellow, then the gold strikes and, depending on the heat history, the color shades from yellow through apricot into ruby. It’s a sophisticated glass. But the real sophistication I’ve seen in the last 10 years has been the development of the people here at the factory who contribute to the problem-solving in making glasses – whether for Dante or for the regular production. The team here has really grown in this time.

DANTE MARIONI Lani always writes the copy that’s in the brochure every year – about “friends” and “bonding” and all that stuff.

And I think, “Oh yeah, for everybody ELSE, but me, I’m just working away.” But, you know, it is actually true.

Making the cups at Bullseye has been a good time and I’ve loved the hard act, the hard work.

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DANTE MARIONI Born Mill Valley, CA, 1964 Currently Independent studio artist, Seattle, WA Education/Training

1984 Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, WA (1984-1985)

1983 Penland School of Craft, Penland, NC Selected Honors and Awards

2002 1st Place - Reticello, Ebeltoft Museum, Ebeltoft, Denmark

1997 Outstanding Achievement in Glass, Urban Glass Award, New York, NY

1988 Young Americans, American Craft Museum, New York, NY

1987 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award

1985 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award

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Selected Collections

Birmingham Museum, Birmingham, AL

Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA

Cincinnati Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH

Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC

Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY

Davis, Wright & Jones, Seattle and Bellevue, WA

Ebeltoft Museum, Ebeltoft, Denmark

Hunter Museum, Chattanooga, TN

Huntsville Museum, Huntsville, AL

Japanese National Museum of Craft, Tokyo, Japan

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

MCI, Washington, DC

(promised gift to National Museum of American Art, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institute)

Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA

Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte, NC

Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

National Museum of Art, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC

National Museum of Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden

New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA

New Zealand National Museum, Auckland, New Zealand

Niijima Glass Museum, Niijima, Japan

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia

Safeco Insurance Company, Seattle, WA

Security Pacific Bank, Seattle, WA

The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA

The Prescott Collection of Pilchuck Glass at the U.S. Bank Centre, Seattle, WA

The White House Crafts Collection, Washington, DC

University Art Museum, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

Vero Beach Museum, Vero Beach, FL

Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England

Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan

SAM ANDREAKOS Born Chicago, IL 1952 Currently Production Manager / Glass Technologist, (since 1994), Bullseye Glass Co., Portland, OR

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Training/Professional Experience

1988 Bullseye Glass Co., Portland, OR (1988 – present)

1981 Uroboros Glass Studios, Portland, OR (1981 – 1988)

Production Manager (at departure)

1979 Glass Craft Studios, Portland, OR

Beveling, restoration and commission work

1976 Self-employed stained glass artist (1976 – 1979)

1974 Alvarado Studios, Chicago, IL (1974 – 1976)

Stained glass restoration and commission work

1972 Victorian Glass Studio, Chicago, IL (1972 – 1974)

Stained glass restoration and commission work Related Educational Experience

2000 Pilchuck Glass School, Technical Manager for “All Bullseye” session

1998 Pilchuck Glass School, Glass blowing with Shunji Omura

1997 Pilchuck Glass School, Teaching assistant to Klaus Moje, Technical Manager for “All Bullseye” session

1994 Pilchuck Glass School, Teaching assistant to Rudi Gritsch & Lino Tagliapietra

1992 Bullseye Glass Co., Assistant to Rudi Gritsch in the artist’s factory residency (1992 – 1993)

1988 Pratt Fine Art Center, Seattle, WA, Pâte de verre workshop with Seth Randal Awards & Professional Recognition

2001 Bullseye Glass Co. “Working Glass” Exhibit

2000 Pilchuck Auction artist

Bullseye Glass Co. “Working Glass” Exhibit

1998 Saxe Award, Pilchuck Glass School

THE TEAM

The Ten Circles would not have happened without Janusz Pozniak and Paul Cunningham. Both are exceptional blowers and artists, and as Dante has mentioned so many times, “absurdly overqualified to be delivering bits and opening glory hole doors.”

A 1986 graduate of the West Surrey College of Art & Design in Farnham, England, Janusz Pozniak has worked, taught and exhibited internationally. He shares a studio in Seattle, WA with Marioni and is represented by William Traver Gallery.

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Paul Cunningham began blowing glass over twenty years ago at the Glass Eye in Seattle. Besides his stints with Marioni he has worked and traveled with Dale Chihuly, assisted Lino Tagliapietra, Dan Dailey, Dick Marquis, Benjamin Moore and numerous other notables in the field while also designing and executing his own works which can be see at Vetri International Glass and Thomas R. Riley Galleries, among others.

Dante, Janusz, Paul: you’ve left an indelible mark on Southeast 21st Avenue.

BULLSEYE GLASS CO.

A manufacturer of colored glass for art and architecture, Bullseye Glass Co. was started in 1974 by three glassblowing graduates of university art programs. Ray Ahlgren, Boyce Lundstrom and Daniel Schwoerer all expected to get rich quick by supplying the stained glass trade, then go on to become Dale Chihuly. Didn’t happen. Today sole survivor and CEO Schwoerer heads the factory in the same Southeast Portland neighborhood where it started. With 125 like-minded artistic souls and the occasional visiting artist friends. For more information, go to: www.bullseyeglass.com.

THANK YOU

To all the magnificent people at Bullseye who have helped out with the Dante event every year. To Susan, Mary, Sam (especially), the production team, R & E assistants, and the gallery crew for spending so many Thanksgiving weekends with us. Thanks to Henry Hillman for the use of his studio in the first two years. And to Ben Edols for his splendid assistance in 1999.

Finally, a huge Thank You to Allison and Lino Marioni for sharing their husband and dad with us for the last ten years of Thanksgiving weekends.

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© 2004 Bullseye Glass Co. DESIGN

PUBLISHED BY

Bullseye Glass Co. 3722 SE 21st Avenue, Portland, OR 97202

Nicole Leaper

For inquiries about the artists or works shown, please contact:

PRODUCTION

The Bullseye Connection Gallery 300 NW 13th Avenue, Portland, OR 97209

Jerry Sayer PHOTOGRAPHY

Bill Bachhuber pages 2, 3, 27 Russell Johnson page 2 (Lino Tagliapietra cup) Roger Schreiber page 29 Jerry Hart page 30 Henry Hillman

T 503-227-0222 F 503-227-0008 E gallery@bullseyeglass.com