Master Of Glass -- In Lino Tagliapietra's Legendary Hands, A Delicate Art Sings With Fire

------------------------- VIEWS OF A MASTER'S GLASS -------------------------

An exhibit of Tagliapietra's work is on display through Oct. 1 at William Traver Gallery, 110 Union St., Seattle. Hours are Tuesdays through Fridays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays noon to 5 p.m.

Somewhere near the middle of the hour or so it takes him to make a sleek, long-necked vase decorated with kaleidoscopic swirls like an elegant glass candy cane, Lino Tagliapietra purses his lips and quietly starts whistling the most famous aria from Puccini's "Madame Butterfly."

A few minutes later, as his three assistants hand him tongs, fistfuls of rags, blow torches - like an expert surgeon he merely signals slightly and whatever tool he needs quickly is laid in his hand - the whistle turns into subdued song.

Tagliapietra has a confident baritone, and as a native Italian born 60 years ago into a working-class family, his love of opera is as deep as his enthusiasm for soccer. Despite the 10 students huddled around him studying his every move, Tagliapietra seems not the least self-conscious to be singing the swan song of a tragic heroine. He's clearly concentrating on the fragile, still molten vase.

Mary Slowinski, program director at Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle, sighs contentedly as Tagliapietra sings to himself in Pratt's hot shop.

"When he starts singing it means he's happy. It means things are going well," said Slowinski. "When he's happy, we're happy."

Given Tagliapietra's status as the master who taught many of the Northwest's leading glass artists their best chops - the renegade craftsman most responsible for passing on the famous Venetian glass traditions to eager Americans and, according to some, the best glass blower in the world - you'd think he'd be singing arias most of the time.

But Tagliapietra, a modest man, doesn't take anything for granted.

"I am a little bit superstitious," he said. "If I make one piece that I love in an incredible way, maybe too much, it will break. Maybe in the cold work I make a mistake, something happen. Then I am very sad. It is very painful for me. Maybe it is like for some men, if they love an incredible woman too much, and it doesn't work, it is very painful."

This may explain the worried expression he wears throughout the demonstration. He does not smile.

Nevertheless, the piece looks as if it will survive. And as he continues to work it, pulling out a long, thin neck that makes it resemble an exotic bird, Tagliapietra says he will call it "Angel Tear." He gives a two-shouldered shrug as an explanation of why. He finds naming his work a difficult task, and one that didn't arise for the first 30 or so years of his career, which were spent churning out top-of-the-line goblets, vases, lighting and tabletop glassware for famous Venetian factories.

Besides, on this day, "Angel Tear" is being created for the benefit of the students, some of whom have traveled from as far as California and Sweden to take Pratt's week-long course with Tagliapietra. Because of the piece's complexity and technical difficulty, it is a tour de force of Venetian glass tricks.

He periodically rolls the molten glob over rows of colored glass rods the size of drinking straws, a classic Venetian technique that results in the striped spirals.

He flips the sludgy hot mass on its side and punches a hole in it to create the neck, a move the students observe with the silent awe of medical interns watching a surgeon make a particularly deft and risky cut near the heart.

And though built like a short, sturdy farmer with a broad chest and big, powerful arms and hands, Taliapietra moves like a boxer. He's light on his feet. Every step he takes to or from the roaring furnace, called a glory hole, is smooth as silk and efficient. He works with glass that is literally hotter, meaning more molten and therefore more difficult to handle, than just about anyone else in the business.

He is the embodiment of nearly 1,000 years of Italian glass-blowing tradition. Other glass artists say he knows things about glass that only come from a rare combination of skill, passion, a lifetime of experience and a kind of genetic programming that results from being the descendant of generations of glass blowers.

Imbued with glass-blowing secrets that he tries to pass on to neophytes, he is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of glass blowing.

"He tells us as much as he can," said Luca Rattazzi, a young Seattle glass blower who often assists Tagliapietra. "He's extremely generous with sharing what he knows. But sometimes you ask him how he did something and he doesn't know. It's so natural for him. He comes from a culture of glass, centuries of glass."

Yet among those who frequent art galleries in Seattle, Tagliapietra's is not necessarily a household name, despite a major show of his work on exhibit all this month at the William Traver Gallery. Many of his former students, including Dante Marioni, are better known.

And though some of the glass works he has physically created are familiar, including the dazzling "Venetian" series of glass vessels designed by Dale Chihuly in the early '90s, Tagliapietra's name is not usually associated with them. Such is Tagliapietra's reputation as a master blower, however, that Chihuly chose him to collaborate on the extravagant, art deco-inspired "Venetians," with their looping bouquets of glass ribbons and flowers.

Tagliapietra, who was born on the island of Murano, a centuries-old glass-blowing community just off of Venice, is generally credited with bringing Venetian discipline and craftsmanship to the Northwest's studio-glass movement. If Seattle's blown-glass art is becoming known for a certain classic formality, sleek beauty and expert craftsmanship, it is because of Tagliapietra.

At a tribute held for Tagliapietra last month at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, Benjamin Moore, one of the region's top glass artists, said that without Tagliapietra, Seattle's glass art "`would not be nearly as refined as it is today. His contribution to us is very, very profound."

Marioni, often considered the most direct local heir of Tagliapietra's craftsmanship and technical skill, said that "just about everything I know from a technical standpoint, Lino has taught me . . . It's a huge honor to get to come here."

Collectors, who spend $6,000 to $24,000 to buy a piece of his work, also are impressed. Tagliapietra has exhibited around the world, including recent shows in Brazil, Japan and much of Europe. He's in demand as a teacher and has just spent most of the summer teaching at Pratt and Pilchuck Glass School. Though he and his wife still have a home in Murano, he spends about half of each year in the U.S. and other parts of Europe, teaching and working in the hot shops of friends.

Like a roving member of royalty who also happens to be charming and (his friends swear) a fabulous cook, he has invitations everywhere he goes.

It is a heady second career for a man with a fourth-grade education who, until his mid-40s, expected to spend his life as most of his friends and male relatives always had: as a craftsman in the glass factories of Murano. He started working in a factory at age 11, and quickly showed he had the talent to become a master craftsman.

But his life took a dramatic turn in 1979 when he accepted an invitation from Pilchuck to teach. Moore, who had studied glass blowing in Murano in the '70s, had in '78 talked Tagliapietra's older brother-in-law into traveling to the Northwest to teach. But the brother-in-law didn't want to do it again, and suggested Tagliapietra as a substitute.

At the tribute to him at SAAM, Tagliapietra, who speaks in understandable but heavily accented English, recalled that "in '79, when I come to Seattle, it is the first time I fly in a plane. The first time, nearly, I leave Italy, except to go to the beach in Yugoslavia. The first time I speak English. I had to take four planes, to Frankfurt, London, New York, Seattle. I arrive three days later. At the airport Benny (Benjamin Moore) is no there, I am so late. I had to get a cab to Pilchuck," which is in Stanwood. "It cost $130."

Tagliapietra's curiosity about the world was his ticket out of the conservative, cloistered, blue-collar world of Muranese glass. Even now in magazines about glass art some of his contemporaries in Murano criticize him for carrying Venetian glass "secrets" off the island, describing him as a kind of industrial spy peddling trade secrets. It is a sentiment that lingers from centuries ago, when glass blowers who tried to leave the island were killed rather than be allowed to start competing factories.

Tagliapietra doesn't like to talk about the rift. Instead he says, simply, that "probably I was born twice. Once when I went into the factory in Murano. Once when I come to the Northwest."

Tagliapietra said he loved watching American movies as a teenager. He laughed that though his father was a communist and idealized the Soviet Union, Tagliapietra dreamed of someday visiting the U.S.

"Coming here was a chance to see the country," he said. "Maybe my only chance. Also, I don't like the idea to spend all my life on the island. There people work at the factory, then at night drink wine, play cards, walk up and down the street until they die. I don't like to drink wine all the time. I don't like to play cards all the time. I prefer life."

In the last 16 years he's also become something of an honorary citizen of the Northwest. The Chamber of Commerce should hire him to make testimonials. He says he loves everything about the Northwest.

He loves Pilchuck and finds the students there "have so much incredible energy." He loves Pendleton blanket designs: "They are so fantastic, incredible." He loves Patagonia clothes: "I like the colors, the shapes. It's fantastic." Though Patagonia is based in California, Tagliapietra is a regular customer at the Seattle store.

He is friends with several of the city's most famous chefs, knows everyone at De Laurenti's store at the Pike Place Market and has even been to Jimi Hendrix's grave, which Tagliapietra's then-teenage son made him promise to visit on his first trip here in '79. Now that he is a grandfather, he says he may next summer bring his 9-year-old grandson to Pilchuck, not only because the boy wants to learn to blow glass, but because Tagliapietra wants to introduce him to "beautiful Seattle."

He even has opinions about Boeing, and can describe the looks of several planes.

"The Boeing 777 is the most beautiful design. It's like a beautiful sculpture," he said. "Like a beautiful woman. I always feel good when I am on Boeing." A great dream, he said, would be to take a tour of Boeing. He seems astounded at the suggestion that the company would doubtless provide him with one.

But despite his present happy career as a world citizen, Tagliapietra never gets far from his first love: glass. He said that he was smitten by the beauty of glass as a young boy. Playing soccer in the streets one day, he noticed some factory workers carrying a huge piece of blown glass.

"I see this and I think one time in my life I want to make something like this," said Tagliapietra. "It is an incredible thing that we human beings are able to make something so beautiful. But I think we have to remember to give the material repsect. It is mysterious."