Man Of Glass -- Dale Chihuly Gaines Fame And Fortune And Then Dreamed Up A Project That Has Him Hanging Chandeliers All Over Europe

By any accounting, Dale Chihuly's 30-year career as an artist has been a rocketing upward arc toward fame, recognition and financial success. A one-time University of Washington interior-design major, an innovator who gets considerable credit for helping shepherd the studio-glass movement into the realm of fine art, a man who is generally regarded as the most famous glass artist alive, Chihuly has gone from designing such individually dazzling table-top pieces as his sensuous "seaforms" and flamboyant "Venetians" to orchestrating massive installations, such as his 1992 show at the Seattle Art Museum.

Now, the Tacoma native has dreamed up an art project for himself that even he admits is huge. Sometime next summer he plans to hang at least four and probably more gigantic glass "chandeliers" over the canals of Venice. To add to the complexity of the project, the "chandeliers" - huge glass wasp-nest assemblages similar to the Chihuly installation in Tacoma's Union Station - will be created in four famous European glass factories.

The idea is for a Seattle-based team of Chihuly's glass blowers and installation experts to collaborate with factory glass blowers at the European sites. It will be a meeting not only of Americans and Europeans, but of artists and artisans.

"Chihuly Over Venice," as Chihuly calls the project, was launched in June, when Chihuly and 30 glass blowers, installers and support staff spent two weeks at the Iittala glass factory in Nuutajarvi, Finland, one of Scandinavia's premier producers of glassware. In Nuutajarvi, Chihuly ended up dangling the "chandeliers" his crew made with the Finns into a nearby river and decorating the woodsy riverbank with glass.

Then, in September, he took an even bigger crew to Waterford, Ireland, home of Waterford Crystal Ltd., manufacturer of elegant glassware. There the collaboration produced about 1,800 pieces of glass that were turned into, among other things, about a dozen chandeliers, some of which were later installed at a nearby castle.

The third segment is scheduled for May, when Chihuly takes his crew to Prague. The grand finale will be next summer. After making chandeliers in one of the historic Murano glass factories near Venice, Chihuly plans to temporarily install over Venetian canals at least one chandelier from each of the four European factories.

Nearly everybody, it seems, is seduced by Chihuly's glamorous glass.

Still, the very title of this glass extravaganza, "Chihuly Over Venice," provokes moans from Chihuly's detractors, some of whom wonder if Chihuly's Midas touch for marketing and publicity has finally sent him over the top. He employs 85 people at his headquarters on north Lake Union and at his shipping center in Tacoma, two of whom spend virtually all their time scheduling museum and gallery shows throughout the U.S. and Asia.

He runs a busy vanity press that publishes lavish coffee-table books on his art. His hot shop cranks out commissioned glass art on a weekly basis. So vast is his art empire that it costs $500,000 a month just to cover the expenses of Chihuly Inc.

If Chihuly pulls this project off, however, he will likely get the last laugh. He has a genius for creating splendor, and if he gets the chandeliers suspended, they will surely be much photographed and much discussed. Comparisons to the sculptor Christo, famous for such massively scaled flights of artistic fancy as wrapping Florida islands in pink fabric, will be inevitable.

IT IS MIDAFTERNOON on a blustery September day in Southeastern Ireland. In a corner of a factory known the world over for producing impeccably crafted lead-crystal stemware, Van Morrison blasts forth at a decibel level that threatens to shatter any stemware on the premises.

Inside, it feels like a rock-'n'-roll barn raising and looks like a movie set.

Television lights drench the "pad" in harsh white. Some of the Seattle glass blowers on the raised, circular blowing floor, or "pad," wear sunglasses against the glare of the blowtorches and furnaces, a practical step that nevertheless adds another whiff of Hollywood to the scene.

Ten people not making glass walk around purposefully murmuring into walkie-talkie headsets. A dozen cell phones have been distributed among the 50-some-member Seattle-based entourage, and those who have one periodically step outside the noise radius to make calls. A portable office complete with a fax machine and few more phone lines has been set up outside. Operation Chihuly is in full swing.

On the pad, which supports an inner ring of fire-breathing furnaces, three glass-blowing teams are going about their tasks with an enthusiasm uncommon in a factory. This may technically be work, but it's also a good time. The glass blowers understand their glory roles as the chief supporting actors, the danger-defying special-effects guys in this artsy, high-voltage production.

Irish, American, and all of them men, the blowers laugh and josh and high-five after their work is carted off to the cooler. If a piece doesn't collapse or shatter at the last minute, a fast-working team can shape a glob of molten glass into a burning hot, eggshell-fragile form in about three minutes. When an Irish jig blares over the speakers, the Irish among them - they are a dozen of Waterford Crystal Ltd.'s most veteran glass blowers - high-step in a light-footed Irish dance that few American men would find manly enough to attempt.

Into this hive of boisterous bonhomie and industry Chihuly strides with more forward velocity than you might expect from a man whose feet are killing him.

He is short, about 5 feet 7, has broad shoulders and a barrel chest on surprisingly bantam-size hips and legs. He wears his standard uniform of chartreuse chinos (he has them specially dyed), a long-sleeve sport shirt rolled to the elbows (on this day it is orange) and his paint-splattered shoes. Because of painful ligament problems in his feet and ankles, his shoes are custom-made. Therefore he wears the same pair all the time, including during his messy, squirt-and-sponge painting sessions. His trademark pirate's eye patch covers his left eye, useless since a car wreck in 1976.

In honor of his hosts, he sports an Irish tweed cap worn backward. Corkscrew hair springs wildly from his head, the helmet of hair making his already big head look larger, even vaguely heroic in a weathered, bulldog-faced way. The overall effect is jaunty.

Two video crews and three photographers spring to action. A couple of the walkie-talkie people trail in Chihuly's wake, along with Chihuly's photogenic fiancee and a retired Florida industrialist-turned-art collector whom everyone refers to as "Jules." Cameramen circle Chihuly like paparazzi. More than half are on his payroll.

Chihuly clambers up onto the pad. He inserts himself into Martin Blank's team, the most theatrical of the three. Blank, a Seattle glass artist who has worked part time for Chihuly for 10 years, is a demonstrative guy. He blows glass like Leonard Bernstein directed orchestras. He squats and sways and grimaces and bites his lip. He emotes.

Fortunately for the visuals, Blank has teamed up with an affable Mutt and Jeff pair of Irishmen who are quick studies. Teams are intentionally integrated in this hands-across-the-sea project, and after only two days Tommy Rowe and Tommy Kialy have become the Irish stars. They're nearly 50, and they've worked at Waterford Crystal for more than 25 years, blowing wine goblets for bridal registries and commemorative fruit bowls. But it's safe to say they've never in their wildest dreams done any glass blowing like this.

Chihuly moves in to direct.

Cameras roll and click. He hunches next to Rowe and sights his good eye down the pipe toward the glass mass like a movie director checking a shot.

Sparks fly. Flames leap. Blank grimaces like he's trying to lift a refrigerator. Chihuly shouts commands, though it's hard to hear what they are. The roar of the furnaces is loud; the pounding rock music is deafening.

A minute of pyrotechnical tricks with a blowtorch and tongs, and the piece resembles a graceful, 5-foot-long stalk with a gigantic calla lily on the end. An Irish art student cocooned in arm-length, fireproof gloves positions himself underneath, and the brittle lily is neatly lopped off the pipe and into his waiting arms. He literally runs it to the cooler.

It's another run batted home. There are high-fives and back slaps all around. Chihuly flings his arms around the Irishmen's shoulders, draws them into the poised viewfinders and mugs for the cameras, which are still rolling.

It's the a perfect finale to a dramatic scene.

In other words, it's a wrap.

THE SEVEN-DAY Waterford "blow" was followed by a week of installation at Lismore Castle, a postcard-perfect castle with fairy-tale turrets and towers. The castle, still privately owned by an English duke who lives elsewhere, is 40 miles west of Waterford. Chihuly rented it for his art happening at a cost of about $20,000 for three weeks. During installation assistants assembled, dismantled, arranged and rearranged more than a thousand pieces of glass more times than they'd like to recall.

Installations ranged from gigantic "chandeliers," 15-foot-deep assemblages that can weigh up to 1,000 pounds, to more modest undertakings that amount to appealingly arranged piles of glass. During the week it was common to turn the corner of a 10-foot English hedge trimmed with the precision of a master sergeant's mustache and find that a mound of cobalt-blue glass forms resembling giant frog feet had been piled against the hedge. When it worked, the effect was delightful, surprising, even magical, like finding Easter eggs hidden in the garden.

Part of what interests Chihuly these days is to photograph such temporary "installations" for later publication in books and portfolios, and to videotape the whole process. In practice this means that he and his crew scout out sites on the castle grounds. Then pieces are painstakingly carried, one piece at a time, from one site to another and "installed" based on Chihuly's directions or the suggestions of some of his chief crew members. If he likes the result, it gets photographed. If not, the installation is tweaked for a second try or dismantled.

The documentation aspect of this enterprise has at times made the project feel like one big photo opportunity. One crew shadowing Chihuly is from KCTS-TV, which is shooting his year-long project for a documentary. The other is a freelance team Chihuly has hired to make another film, though he says he has no specific plans about where it will be shown, or when. He talks generally about distributing it to film festivals, or as a television video, and mentions the recent, widely acclaimed documentary on fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, "Unzipped," as a model.

Chihuly says he got the idea to create "chandeliers" in 1992 when he was preparing for the SAM show. He made one for that show and liked it so much that he made about a dozen over the next two years. Though not as complicated to blow as some of the his previous series - the extravagant "Venetian" vessels with their snaking tendrils and exuberant colors are technically much trickier - the chandeliers are his biggest and riskiest works to date.

"If I do something for a while I get bored with it; I like to change," says Chihuly. "I can only work on something for so long. In some ways glass blowing is limited as to what you can do with it. I couldn't sustain myself just trying to discover new shapes. There's a lot more flexibility putting parts together like we are now."

Chihuly's work has always been partly about outrageous splendor, but with the chandeliers, it's also become unabashedly grand - and increasingly expensive. At up to $200,000 each, depending partly on size, the chandeliers, which can be lit with inserted neon tubes, aren't for every art lover's budget. Leslie Jackson, Chihuly's fiancee and a woman who sees her role as helpmate partly in terms of marketing, is working on a plan to sell smaller chandeliers, perhaps 3 to 5 feet in length, for $50,000.

On this trip, Jules Brassner, the Florida collector, has spent $75,000 for one of the medium-size chandeliers made at Waterford. Among the dozen other wealthy art collectors who also accepted invitations to stay at Lismore Castle for a few days during the project (at their own expense), at least one other is interested in buying a chandelier, according to Jackson. Collectors who visited included three Northwest businessmen, Bradford Romano, Frank Everett and George Stroemple (a major Portland glass and art collector); Charles Cowles, Chihuly's New York dealer and a former SAM curator; and Rose Mattus, a New Yorker who with her husband founded Haagen-Dazs Ice Cream.

Still, it will take more than the sale to Brassner to cover the cost of "Chihuly Over Venice." Overall, Chihuly says the trip to Ireland will cost him $250,000, the same as the trip to Finland. Host factories agree to pay some costs in exchange for lapping up a little Chihuly cachet - Waterford Crystal said the project cost it about $170,000 - but the bulk of the bills fall to Chihuly. Jackson and some of his administrators say he doesn't worry as much about costs and cash flow as they do, though they sometimes wish he would. Then again, the sole reason for the existence of Chihuly Inc. is to allow Chihuly to follow whatever muse beckons.

Artistically speaking, he gets to do pretty much whatever he likes.

IT IS NEAR the end of the installation now, and as Chihuly's crew of installers continues to move glass around the castle grounds like so many worker ants, Chihuly's energy is flagging. He is known for being a human tornado for days and months on end, then crashing; now this Ireland expedition, coming so close after Finland, is wearing him down. His crew talks about it in hushed whispers; he himself says he is "in a quieter mood here than in Finland. I go up and down, anyway."

Which is not so surprising considering the schedule he's kept. At Waterford he not only supervised the blow, but negotiated nearly daily with the company's managers over logistics and costs. He was the guest of honor at receptions at both the Waterford Crystal and the Dublin home of the U.S. ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith. He had a five-minute spot on the Dublin equivalent of the Letterman show, and he helped flip hamburgers for a crowd of Irish glass blowers and their families at the party he threw on the last night in Waterford.

Billed by the Irish as "Chihuly's Hooley at The Holy" - a "hooley" is a party and the "Holy" was shorthand for The Holy Cross, the 300-year-old pub that Chihuly rented for the bash - the event saw the place stuffed to its thatched roof with Irish and American Guinness-swilling revelers. By the end of the evening the place resembled an Irish wake, as week-long friendships were toasted with Guinness and emotional songs.

Though Chihuly cut out of the farewell pub party early to dine with the collectors, he loves big, messy group events, whether for work or for pleasure. On this trip he has paid for two families he befriended in Nuutjarvi to travel to Ireland to watch, to help with the installations and to strengthen, by their physical presence, the international subplot of this Chihuly extravaganza. He likes everything to be a family affair, with himself as patriarch.

Chihuly has been called imperious and mercurial, and some of his more public fits of pique are the stuff of legend. But in Ireland there were no snits. Some friends say that at 54, he is mellowing. Besides, he has always had plenty of charm and charisma.

His voice is low and gravelly like rocks plunking down a well. He calls women of all ages "dear" in a sweet, old-fashioned way, as though addressing a little girl or a grandmother. And he is genuinely curious about many things. People are flattered to death when he lavishes them his undivided attention, even for a few minutes, as they explain some principle of chemistry, or a bit of local history. He asks smart questions. He really is interested.

Chihuly's charm is obviously not lost on Jackson, who officially became his fiancee in the first-class section of the plane they took to Ireland.) She calls Chihuly "sweet thing," regularly and in public.

Jackson is 34, though her girlish candor often makes her seem younger. She is a Texas native, a Vassar graduate, a onetime massage therapist and the holder of a master's degree in Russian studies and English from the University of Washington. A mutual friend set her and Chihuly up on a date few years back. Both had been briefly married once before, one reason Jackson says they aren't hurrying to set a wedding date.

LIKE ALMOST everything else he's ever done, Chihuly's chandeliers over Venice will undoubtedly be dismissed by some highbrows as decorative flamboyance, flashy design but not art. Chihuly pays little attention to such criticism. He notes, correctly, that his '92 SAM show drew two to three times as many visitors as any show since, and that now that it's traveling around the U.S. it continues to draw huge crowds from Brooklyn to Anchorage. The son of a Tacoma meatcutter-turned-union organizer, Chihuly is a populist when it comes to art. He wants regular people to like it. He cares much less what the critics think. `I don't know why it pleases me that people want to see what I do, but it always has," he says.

Beauty is beguiling, of course, and Chihuly simply seems incapable of creating much that's not beautiful. One of the most successful installations at Lismore Castle was a delicate-looking wasp nest of amethyst glass tendrils suspended between magnificent rows of ancient yew trees. When the brilliant late-afternoon light shone through the canopy of boughs, the chandelier was stunning, glittering like a giant jewel. It was impossible not to be at least momentarily mesmerized.

Another scene of visual poetry was choreographed in a bombed out, rubble-strewn, cathedral-ceilinged shell of a room that everyone referred to as "the destruction room." In a wing of the castle slated for remodeling, the room looked like a war zone until a rosy chandelier was precariously suspended from crossbeams. The chandelier took up most of the room, and the contrast between the rubble and the chandelier was so sublime that visitors had a tendency to whisper, as though in a church.

As the film crews flooded it in hot light, Chihuly examined the destruction-room chandelier from various angles, like a connoisseur trying to decide if an artwork is really worth the price. He looked weary leaning on a cane - his feet worsened as the trip went on - but quietly pleased. Two camera crews and two still photographers aimed their cameras and shot.

A few days later, much of the glass made in Ireland was shipped back to Seattle. Some also was left at Waterford and at the castle. The lovely destruction-room chandelier was disassembled and stored there. Sometime next summer it may be reassembled over Venice.

Robin Updike reports on the arts for The Seattle Times. Harley Soltes is Pacific Magazine's photographer. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Chihuly's Resume

-- A native of Tacoma, Dale Chihuly is one of only three American artists ever given a solo show at the Palais du Louvre in Paris. It opened there in 1986 and later traveled through Europe and the Middle East.

-- He founded Pilchuck Glass School in 1971 with philanthropists Anne Gould Hauberg and John Hauberg and remained its guiding artistic spirit for years. Pilchuck is now the premier studio-glass program in the world.

-- In the 1970s and early '80s Chihuly earned a reputation in the then-small community of glass-art collectors for his seductive, colorful "blanket cylinders," inspired by Navajo blankets, sensuous "seaforms" and dazzling "macchias." Even small examples of these pieces now cost $3,000 to $10,000. More typically these days he gets commissions for wall-sized glass installations or "chandeliers" for private homes. Such commissions can cost $100,000 to $500,000.

-- In Western Washington, Chihuly's work is on public display at the City Centre office and retail building on Fifth Avenue; at the Tacoma Art Museum, where there is a permanent display; and at Union Station in Tacoma.

-- Chihuly is one of the creative forces behind the International Museum of Modern Glass, a museum of glass art proposed for downtown Tacoma near Union Station. Still in the planning stages, the museum will not be open for several years. It will include plenty of Chihuly's art and some major architectural features, such as pavilions on a pedestrian bridge, that Chihuly will design in glass. - Robin Updike