Glass Master Dale Chihuly fills galleries with creations great and small

A SHORT, SCRUFFY art pirate, complete with a real black eye patch, glassmaker Dale Chihuly has freed glass blowing from the roadside craft booth in the past 20 years and brought it, welcome or not, to the cultivated atmosphere of the urban art museum. Made in his Seattle-area studio, his work shines like a bent ray of sunshine fracturing the perennial Northwestern gloom.

If the art world isn't unanimously delighted with this efflorescence, the public is. From tiny glass floral vases to room-size chandeliers, Chihuly's work is fun, exuberant, a little out of control. It's gaudy, like calliope music or, perhaps, the entire Baroque. Chihuly glass is easy to look at, even in its slightly creepy manifestations. To the consternation of those critics who insist on explicit meaning in art, it doesn't carry a discernible message. Best of all, a lot of Chihuly glass - a whole lot of it, in fact - is on display this winter in one whopper of a show at the Portland Art Museum. Actually it's two whoppers in one: "Dale Chihuly: The George Stroemple Collection" and "Chihuly Over Venice." Even with the museum's $11 price tag for admission, the Chihuly double-header is well worth the trip up Interstate 5.

As guests arrived at the art museum for a recent preview of his show, Chihuly himself, standing at a low table dead center in the museum's white marble lobby, spattered acrylic paint right out of the bottle onto large sheets of drawing paper. Badged interns shuttled back and forth with finished drawings and fresh paper. Art world guests, wearing much formal black, hovered on the room's fringes, talking in whispers, if at all. Television cameras recorded every sacred moment, along with half a dozen whirring and clicking still photographers. A handful of nonprofessionals sneaked point-and-shoot cameras out of pockets and purses for discreet snapshots. As happy as a 6-year-old at his own birthday party, Chihuly carried on like Jackson Pollock reincarnated, splashing paint all over his black shoes and trousers, turning out masterpieces as fast as the interns could move. He was the art god, performing for the masses.

Then some precise, inexplicable moment arrived and Chihuly held up his latex-gloved hands, a sign of completion, perhaps, or victory. Several in the audience began uncertain applause. "I like to draw," he said, and then explained he had been doing a birthday card for his good friend, Hillary Clinton, whose birthday was - well, one day soon. "Any excuse to draw," he said. "Of course, drawing wasn't meant to be done in public. I am very prolific in drawing, as you witnessed. I like to work fast. I do everything fast. Glass blowing is fast. I probably do a thousand or two drawings in a year."

"Chihuly Over Venice" consists of a dozen enormous glass chandeliers, made under Chihuly's direction by artisans in five different nations and displayed outdoors last year in Venice, Italy. The work then traveled to Kansas City, Mo., and then to Portland for its West Coast premiere. The term "chandelier" is evocative rather than descriptive, Chihuly explained. These massive creations, hung from the ceiling on chains or sprouting up from the floor on solid armatures, writhe with energy and light. They are glass come to life; mineral becomes vegetable or even animal. The Portland Art Museum has done a spare, stunning presentation of the chandeliers, giving over in one case a huge, darkened gallery to just three works: one cobalt, one red, one white. An international project in red, white and blue.

Born in Tacoma, Chihuly was headed in all the wrong directions as a youth. "I was a bit of a hood in high school," he said. "In junior high and in high school. I was into cars and pool halls." He began college on the commercial side of the art world, studying interior design. Then he dropped out, traveled in Europe and ended up in Israel, working on a kibbutz and pulling his life back into focus. By 1968, Chihuly won a Fulbright fellowship to study glassmaking at a traditional European glass factory in Murano, Venice; there he developed a taste for the "studio" system of glassmaking, in which a team of artisans works on a project under a master's direction. The experience has served him well. Chihuly lost an eye in a 1976 traffic accident in England, leaving him without depth perception and thus unable to work directly with blown glass. Instead, he has served as catalyst, bringing master glassmakers together to create works under his direction. You can see this chemistry in action in a videotape shown at the museum of Chihuly's studio in action - fast track art, fueled by rock and roll, the one-eyed master directing all the players.

Chihuly may be at his best in this puppet-master role, as you can see in the second and larger part of the museum's show, "Dale Chihuly: The George Stroemple Collection." Stroemple is a Portland businessman who has been Chihuly's friend and biggest patron, buying up some 500 pieces, large and small, since 1990. His collection, about 350 pieces of which are on display in the Portland show, reaches back to the early 1970s and the pre-accident days. Thus in one gallery in Portland you can see Chihuly's "Irish Cylinders": simple, green-glass cylinders like bottoms of Sparklets bottles, with line drawings and words from James Joyce's "Ulysses" applied in glass to the outside.

At the preview, Chihuly admitted he nearly threw the cylinders out during a studio cleaning several years ago. Had he, it might not have been a serious loss, except to future Chihuly scholars who will certainly mine them for artistic antecedents. At the other end of the spectrum, Chihuly recently directed a collaboration between Venice glass artisans Lino Tagliapietra and Pino Signoretto. The fruits of this union fill yet another large museum gallery - yes, this show is huge - with ornate bowls decorated lushly with gold dusted glass cherubs and dragons. Cherubs? In the wrong hands this could be Rococo run amok, but Chihuly manages to walk an aesthetic high wire in Lino/Pino, as the series is called, without losing his balance.

Chihuly has said he is obsessed with color: "I never saw one I didn't like."

Across the hall from Lino/Pino, that obsession turns into an extravaganza of color and form in a continuation of Chihuly's Venetian works. Even the museum's 45-minute audio tape tour admits the work in this gallery may be over the top. The words "Star Trek" hover in several conversations at once as guests fill the gallery, which is lined with 3-foot tall vases whose aggressive flowers seem to have grown through the vase walls. The scene is at once gaudy and overwhelming. So finely worked is the glass that actual flower petals seem imprisoned in some of the thick, stylized blossoms.

A small gallery at the end displays the Venetian "piccolos," little works no more than a foot or so tall; and here, at last, you feel utterly surrounded by kitsch, like you've arrived in a strange gift shop on the coast. Chihuly is known for his glass, but as he told museum guests, he does love to draw. One of the better parts of the show is a gallery full of his drawings, big framed pictures done in various mixed media combinations of acrylic, watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pastel and even coffee and berry juice.

The single piece not to be missed, however, is a massive work from the Stroemple collection titled "Laguna Murano Chandelier," crafted by Signoretto and Tagliapietra at Chihuly's studio and in Italy during 1996 and 1997. Displayed by itself in a small, darkened gallery at the museum, the chandelier, made in five separate units, combines brownish glass reeds reminiscent of a kelp bed with fantastic sea creatures, including a mermaid.

So intensely organic is the whole that it seems to writhe with some alien biology; translucent glass bulbs buried in the kelp look like egg cases. Some visitors hurried out of the room, in fact, driven by the work's high creep factor.

Nov. 2, 1997