Kittrell Riffkind: Custom Stained Glass for Any Style
On Feb. 3rd Kittrell hosted the Scent Bottle Invitational in its 13th year featuring one-of-a-kind and limited edition perfume bottles from more than 50 contemporary glass artists nationwide. The Glass Art Society is an international non-profit organization founded in 1971 whose purpose is to encourage excellence, advance education, promote appreciation and development of the glass arts, and support the worldwide commercial artists who work with glass.
Dale Chihuly is most frequently lauded for revolutionizing the studio glass movement by expanding its original premise of the solitary artists working in a studio environment to encompass the notion of collaborative teams and a division of labor within the creative process. A prolific artist whose work balances content with an investigation of the material’s properties of translucency and transparency, Chihuly began working with glass at a time when reverence for the medium and for technique was paramount.
Stylistically during the past 40 years Chihuly’s sculptures in glass have explored color, line, and assemblage. Chihuly and his teams have created a wide vocabulary of blown forms, revisiting, and refining earlier shapes while creating new elements such as his recent Fiori, all of which demonstrate mastery and understanding of glassblowing techniques. The history of glassmaking started in ancient Egypt and the Middle East.
Art glass normally means the modern art glass movement in which individual artists working alone or with a few assistants to create works from molten glass in relatively small furnaces of a few hundred pounds of glass. Before the 1960s art glass would have referred to glass made for decorative use usually by teams of factory workers taking glass from furnaces with a thousand or more pounds of glass. In an art glass studio, ideally, “production work” shows more hand worked variation than was allowed in pure factory work environment and each piece shows some of the lead glass worker’s creativity, the gaffer.
“There are many reasons why I work with glass,” said Chris Belleau who owns Belleau Art Glass in Providence, R.I. “One of the aspects I truly enjoy about my profession is teamwork.” Located at the southeast corner of Beltline and the North Tollway in Addison, TX, Kittrell is open 10-6 M-S. The address is 5100 Beltline Road Suite 820. For more information call 1-888-865-2228.
