This is the March 17, 2006 edited version of my essay for the book about William Morris. It differs from the published version, which I will replace this with once I’ve found the final version in my archives.

William Morris: Native Species. Author: William Warmus. Belzar Springs Press. Portland, Oregon. 2006. ISBN 978-0-9788695-0-2

William Morris: Native Species

William Warmus

The idea for the Native Species series originated with the collector George Stroemple, who approached the artist William Morris with a proposal for a collaboration. The idea was simple: take a tour of George’s ranch in the Steens Mountain region of southeastern Oregon, collect samples of some of the flora, and document the fauna. Take this material back to the studio and make the species in glass, using the vessel form to suggest their environments. And make three dozen of them—the final count was thirty-eight. George also wanted Morris to think about how the nineteenth century saw nature, a period that actively interests him as a collector. Although George would keenly like to have a significant collection of the work of the art nouveau artist Emile Gallé, he does not, but he does have a significant collection of Meiji-era ceramics, which he made available to Bill Morris. The artist was charged by the twenty-first–century collector to air out the musty nineteenth century, metaphorically dusting off Oriental ceramics and French art nouveau vases and bringing them once again to life—in our era, a charge that resonates with the observation made by T. S. Eliot, in his mode as a critic: “powerful art ages and needs to be refreshed.”1 The name for the series, Native Species, is a result of their trying to find the right words to describe what Morris created. While the term native applies to species that originate in a specific region, it can also apply to a species that has been in a geographic location for a very long time. Both definitions are valid for the subject matter of these artworks.

Morris is among the few contemporary artists who could undertake such a project. Glass is a demanding medium, and convincing realism in glass is difficult to accomplish. The earliest substantial glass objects, c. 1500 bc, were vessels or beads created in the Middle East. But it was not long before glassmakers contributed to the realistic portrayal of the human form: the golden mask of King Tutankhamen (c. 1327 bc), including the eyes and the outlines around the eyes, is inlaid with semiprecious stones and glass. Without the inlays, the mask would lose much of its intrinsic appeal: the stonelike quality of the glass frames the ethereal shine of the solid gold matrix. Around this time, the first cast-glass sculptures also appear, taking human and animal form. And when glassblowing was invented, again probably in the Middle East in the first century bc, glassblowers often sought to portray human and animal forms, at times blowing glass into molds that took the shape of a human head.

The working of molten glass by hand, without a mold, into human or animal forms, has always been difficult and has required consummate skill. There is a difficulty in imprinting the realistic images with the correct level of detail, the correct crispness. Capturing facial expressions or suggesting the movement and flexibility of a leaf can be excruciatingly hard when working the hot glass with cumbersome metal tools. Even if the portrayal the artist wishes to achieve is accurate, the necessary reheating of the glass may melt the detail and obliterate the concept. Morris has succeeded where others have failed; unerringly, he captures with a gesture the features and movements of natural forms.

Despite his ability, he has been criticized for appropriating prehistoric, ancient, and aboriginal cultures and their art. I disagree. He has the fantastic skill to enlarge upon the themes taken up by all these cultures. He is a pluralist and a cosmopolitan, whose talent gives him insight into the character of prehistoric women and men, nature modern or extinct, and aboriginal cultural traditions that are lost forever or overexposed in the pages of National Geographic. He records what he observes as a hunter and explorer. What he cannot know he invents, but with sympathy. And he enlarges, sometimes in scale, always in richness of impression. The results are there for us to experience: the prehistoric (Cache), the ancient Egyptian (the Canopic Jars), the conjectured ritual (the Artifacts series) (figs. 1–3).

Portland, Oregon—Summer, 2005

In order to reach the room that holds the Native Species series created by William Morris, I, too, must pass over and through many barriers of scale and time. First, a substantial geography: flying into Portland, Oregon, from Ithaca, New York, I cross the continental divide and land in a basin surrounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean and the Coastal Range and on the east by the Cascades. Unpacking in my base of operations, at the Hotel Lucia, I set out on the polished mahogany desk a laptop computer, two digital cameras, a BlackBerry, a gigabyte of flash memory attached to a keychain, a cell phone (also with camera), and three small Moleskine notebooks. Perhaps, if radio waves were visible, some kind of cobweb (or rainbow) would cling to the electronics and arc out of the hotel window. This equipment is also a barrier: because it links me to my world of collectors, artists, family, and friends, it can distract me from settling into the correct frame of mind for looking at Morris’s work.

I was asked to look at the series and write about them in part because, in 1984, I had written a book about Gallé and about the incredible vessels he had made in late nineteenth-century France, work in glass, wood, and ceramics that was an exploration of art nouveau and symbolist themes. That book was on George Stroemple’s desk and in Bill’s studio as the commission progressed. I am curious to see whether, in his pieces, Morris was taking a shot at westernizing (as in American West) and updating Gallé .

In the 1980s, as I prepared the book, which was the catalogue for an exhibition for the Corning Museum of Glass, titled Emile Gallé: Dreams into Glass,2 I explored Gallé’s work during several trips to Europe, trips made before cell phones and the Internet and so without any electronic web to enmesh my impressions, no microcircuits floating in the vision of my eyes. I remember the stone-tanned light that reflected up from the courtyard of the Louvre in Paris, through the open window and into a small dusty study, where I had a chair, a notebook, a table, and an array of precious objects created by Gallé. One vessel, a type of ewer, was encrusted with applied seahorses, wrought as if partly fossilized. I think Gallé intended it to look as if it were recently dredged up from the depths of the sea. Inscribed on that briny vessel were the Latin words Vitam impendere vero (Life depends on truth).

Later, in Lugano, Switzerland, in the precincts of a very private collection, at a table that also held a box of luscious chocolates (indulgent treats from the collector), I inspected a small squat vase clotted with pine needles (fig. 4). Green needles encrusted the surfaces of the amber vessel. Green needles penetrated partly into the amber wall of the glass, like miniature harpoons. And green needles floated within those walls, tinted amber by the mass of the glass. Here was a Gallé that was modest, even ugly, and yet I found myself riveted by its intricate structure. This structure seemed to propose a kind of narrative, although I never felt that I understood that little nameless object. But I knew immediately that I wanted to own it, to set it on my desk at home, to live with it long enough so that its story, or at least some of its story, might be revealed to me.

Closer to home, on the shelves of a busy auction house in New York City, I inspected a rare Dragonfly chalice (fig. 5), discovering, inside the bowl, frantic mayflies of glass, escaping forever from their predators. Created by Gallé in 1903 for a home in Brussels, it had remained there until 1980, when the Corning Museum of Glass bought it at auction. At the time I had a pang of conscience for removing that exquisite chalice from long-familiar surroundings.

New impressions modify the impressions received from the objects already known. An impression needs to be constantly refreshed by new impressions in order that it may persist at all.

—T. S. Eliot

My impressions of Gallé were formed as I traveled and looked at these and other masterpieces. Two decades intervene now between that time and the fresh impressions I am seeking from the work of William Morris, a late twentieth-century master of glass and interpreter of nature. How has he reinterpreted Gallé? Will the new impressions I seek revive my original ones? And what, if anything, do Gallé and Morris have in common?

The Place of Art

If only it were easier to look at fine art. If only we could display the art we find beautiful in our homes, where it would be available every day. Experience proves otherwise. Some art is too rare, owned only by museums. Some is simply too big, or too deeply hidden, or too hard to find. The staircase that led down to Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt was filled with tons of stone debris and forgotten for hundreds of generations. In twenty-first–century Portland, where I will examine the Native Species, an electronic mesh surrounds the warehouse, which is reached on foot by crossing the Willamette River from the Hotel Lucia. On a street shadowed by a concrete and steel overpass and lined with shiny, immaculately manufactured cars now covered in dust, the warehouse is one among several buildings of no special quality—an unobtrusive, secret hiding place in a neighborhood of warehouses, the closest restaurant a twenty-four-hour Burger King. There is absolutely nothing distinctive about this place. That is its attraction.

I meet Linda Tesner, the curator of the Stroemple Collection, who produces a brass key that unlocks the first of a series of doors leading into storerooms. Once inside, she moves to turn on the overhead lamps, which come to life slowly and emit an amber sodium-vapor glow. On a white and gray plastic keypad, engraved with the single word FOCUS, she enters the code that shuts off the alarm system. The overhead lights, now hot and bright, reveal a large L-shaped room that is full almost to the rafters with solid-looking cardboard boxes, as plain and ordinary as any you might see inside a brown UPS truck. A closer look reveals that these boxes have Polaroid photos on their blank faces, and labels, indicating that these cartons contain objects that are distinctive and unusual and quite rare. This room is a hot spot holding works of art. Impressions matter inside this room, because that is all there is here: works of art that must be experienced.

The art is unpacked for me as I set up my workplace. I anticipate the experience to come with a mild tension. These objects are made from glass: fragile and powerful, strong and brittle. They may not be meant to intimidate, but they do intimidate because they are so valuable and yet so delicate. I have spent almost my entire life handling glass: there is invariably an edginess to the process. We give it wide berth, as if glass, because it is so fragile, takes up more space than other media.

As the tables are populated by the glass, I see that Morris has made a series of vessels unlike his previous work; these are perhaps his most subtle and intricate creations. The contradiction comes down to this: to experience them, I must hold them in my hands and look at them as closely as possible, almost as if they were jewels. But they are larger than jewels and they are fragile. Some are tall and thin and rest on small bases. I shrug my shoulders: this is the exquisite character of glass. And then everyone leaves. I am locked inside this chamber for hours each day. There is no sound from the outside and the concrete floor is softened by a large rust-colored oriental carpet. I have a folding table on which to work. Around the perimeter of the room are five more folding tables, each covered with a green felt blotter. Arrayed on these tables are the Stroemples, about three dozen of them. The overhead track lights are intensely white halogen spots and floods. There is a smooth, velveteen sound of the continuous flow of air into the room. An interrogation chamber for art? Perhaps. At times more like a monk’s cell. Some days I have no food or water, but that is due only to my forgetfulness. I can easily go outside to the twenty-four-hour Burger King, although I am annoyed by the daylight and the lunchtime crowd there.

If this chamber of vessels is an interrogation room, my own interrogator is the mural hanging on the wall opposite me. It is perhaps the most famous work by the painter Alexis Rockman: Evolution (fig. 6). Painted in 1992, the mural is mammoth: eight feet high and twenty-four feet long. It is simply here, not a part of my project. Nonetheless, the mural with its hundreds of species of critters dominates the soundproof chamber.

I am squeezed between the intense Rockman and the subtle Native Species, aware that the disparate scales of these artworks will resolve over time into gratifying experiences. I start to pace. I have a digital camera in hand and make some fuzzy shots. I put the camera down and take up one of the vases. And then another. I begin to survey these pieces. Some seem close to the aesthetic of Disney animations, veering toward kitsch. Others are darkly obsessive, making me think of the Holy Grail, which was itself a kind of chalice, and bringing to mind the Chalice of Antioch, which I recently viewed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I am drawn to the autumnal colors, even darker and more brooding than those used by Gallé.

Steens Mountain

Spending time in a warehouse looking is one way, within a universe of possibilities, of experiencing art. The sparely furnished room focuses the mind and eye and hands on the work. There are few distractions in this monastic environment and virtually no concern for placement or lighting. There are no noisy crowds, no guards telling you not to touch. Close looking and handling of the artworks is suited to such a place. Writing itself can become the temptation that haunts such rooms, troubling the mind and emotions, tempting the critic to betray the pure experience of the art with the wrong words, with too many overwrought sentences. Another way to experience art, some would argue, is to go directly to nature, to see nature as a work of art. The birth of the Native Species commission was outdoors on Steens Mountain in the high desert country of southeastern Oregon, when George Stroemple invited Bill Morris to his ranch, known as the Wild Horse, to walk the land. They laid the plans for these vessels in wide open, quiet spaces.

Steens Mountain is a single giant block of rock, uplifted and vastly tilting. Erosion has worn canyons into the block, and springs flow down these canyons into the desert basin below the lofty peaks. A wide salt flat occupies the center of the basin, flat enough and big enough that you can engage the cruise control on your car, take your hands off the wheel, and cruise on to nowhere in particular for half an hour. Between the salt flat and the peak there are only a few cattle ranches, some, like the Alvord Ranch, encompassing hundreds of thousands of leased and deeded acres of grazing land.

Steens feels remote and is remote, but the ranchers form a close-knit group. It is difficult to place this community in time: the buckaroos, as the cowhands are called, ride horses and rope steer. And they ride trucks too. The children do their homework inside nineteenth-century stone cabins just off the dirt main street of Alvord Ranch, their hands on computer keyboards, their eyes on monitors, but their minds perhaps diverted by thoughts about the start of the branding season. A conversation with a working buckaroo can come down to the simplest exchange of short sharp sentences, the envy of the tormented critic.

George’s ranch takes its name from the place it occupies, the gentle valley that leads up to historic Wild Horse Canyon. In anticipation of the Native Species commission, Stroemple and Morris hiked and drove the trails around Steens, soaking up the lay of the land, its colors, and its atmosphere. George collected fragments such as pine needles and cones, storing them in a shoe box and later sending them to Bill.

The idea of the commission was straightforward: Look at these souvenirs of nature, think about the interpretations of nature by the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art nouveau glassmakers, such as Emile Gallé, Louis C. Tiffany, Daum, and Lalique, as well as Meiji-era Japanese ceramics. Then make a set of vessels. About three dozen were made, and these George intends to treat as a single creation, to be placed in custom-made cabinets. A tour of the cabinets might evoke the tour George and Bill made that day at Wild Horse.

Morris added some leaves collected around his own ranch in Washington State. And he explored a few techniques new to or seldom used in his repertoire. Most notably, he decided to work with multiple layers of glass, so that the objects he represented, for example a leaf, could float within the wall of the vessel as well as being applied to the outside. This is similar to a technique that art nouveau artists, especially Gallé, used to great effect. I call it stirring up the soup of the glass: enriching the wall of the glass (the soup) with inner structure (minestrone rather than a clear broth). Some feel that the result is far tastier than the pale and colorless cut-crystal glass, for example, that was in fashion before the art nouveau artists took center stage. The Native Species cabinet vessels are Stroemple’s most recent collaboration. Although he has been collecting art since he was a young man, George has chosen to focus on only five artists working in glass: Dale Chihuly, William Morris, the collaborative team of Flora Mace and Joey Kirkpatrick, and the Venetian master Lino Tagliapietra. These artists have something in common: much of their work has been made in the Pacific Northwest, and since the 1970s and early 1980s, they have on occasion worked together as well as independently. For example, Tagliapietra blew many of Chihuly’s most significant Venetian vessels (and Stroemple owns many of them). It would be possible to write the history of glass in the Pacific Northwest using the stories of just these five individuals, with illustrations from the Stroemple collection

The commissions that Bill has created for George are founded on their common love of the outdoors, of unmediated nature, and on the attraction of opposites. Bill says he does not collect anything, except experiences, using the experiences to inspire his work. George is a born collector. He collects what Morris creates. Stroemple was a marine, as was his father. He served in Vietnam, valued there as a skilled sharpshooter. He is tall, compact, with a well-scrubbed and delicate complexion. An outdoorsman, he has to spend a lot of time indoors running his businesses, which are based in Portland with tentacles extending throughout the Pacific basin and more recently into the Middle East. He manages hardware (nuts and bolts and plywood)and hardware (computer servers). And he escapes by car to his two ranches, one near Sisters, Oregon, and one alongside Steens Mountain. George is reserved and acutely observant, and the care with which he observes becomes evident in the care and consideration he gives to others. But when he collects, he smiles a childlike grin as the artwork is unpacked, as if he is seeing it for the first time. This same smile appears when he talks about his experience of nature. Steens, where George has been hunting since he was a young man, suits him with its immense open spaces and the subtle drama inherent in the cycles of the seasons. The Wild Horse Ranch is perhaps the grandest artwork George can experience on a regular basis.

Hunting Glass

George brings a hunter’s eye to art, as when he recalls a trip to Venice in 1996 that led him to the studio of the glass maestro Pino Signoretto, on the island of Murano in the Venetian Lagoon. The occasion was the conclusion of Chihuly over Venice, an outdoor exhibition of Dale Chihuly’s glass chandeliers, some mounted above the canals. Now Chihuly was directing the creation of a grand collaboration between Pino Signoretto and Lino Tagliapietra that would result in the Laguna Murano chandelier. George was silent, engrossed in the details of the hotshop and the graceful skills of the team at work. He was also in the process of deciding that he wanted to own the chandelier sculpture, which has since become part of his collection. He says now that, at the time, the colors and textures of the evolving chandelier parts reminded him of a gutted deer stomach—crinkly and pearly, pinky and amber—like dried parchment with an iridescent glaze.

William Morris, too, is tall, tanned, handsome, also a hunter. My earliest memory of him goes back to the early 1980s, at the Pilchuck Glass School, deep in a tree farm north of Seattle, where Bill, already a master, was blowing glass in the open-air hotshop, very early in the morning. He is wearing a tank top, his torso steaming in the morning chill. He has animal magnetism, is the image of the wild (as in natural rather than out of control) artist, forger of spectacular and controversial work. Two decades later and widely considered the finest American glassblower, Bill radiates health in the form of a polished and assured strength that is at times attractively intimidating. This strength gives Bill the hunter and glassblower a competitive edge as he seeks difficult goals.

Working in glass means confronting, every day, the intimidating nature of the material: it is burning hot, unruly when molten, brittle when cool. Bill has mastered glass, and controls its unruliness with ease. It is the radiance of glass that now challenges him. Transparent glass hides in light, appears to be light, mirrors the light back at us. It is soprano tending toward the shrill. Bill seeks baritone notes to extend its range and make it more subtle. He would darken the glass. It was the English engraver Laurence Whistler who wrote: “The light needs the dark to become articulate.”3 The result for Morris is work that is shaded, layered, and freighted, not with clumsy ideas or strained emotions, but with roots deep in the “life of significant soil.”4

For the Stroemple commission, George had encouraged Bill to go beyond his ever-darkening earthen palette and consider sunset tones and the pastels of winter ice and snow, elements and conditions also encountered by hunters. Bill made several vessels from this charge, among them cat. 00 <no. 26>, and then returned to his own autumnal palette. A list I have in hand from Bill is illustrated with thumbnail-sized schematic sketches and written descriptions of the Native Species series, described sparely as “pine”; “oak and acorn”; one with a “shrike”; another a “birch”; “about a beetle”; “a dragonfly.” One is a collection bowl (full of desert critters), one, a “chipmunk vessel,” another described as a “puffy” tree.

For Morris these vessels formed “a very subtle series; it was not a straightforward project. Not scientific in the least.”5 He had Gallé in mind, also Lalique and Daum and Tiffany. “I had never done representation like this before. I didn’t know how Gallé made his work. . . . I had to cheat. I sought the feel.” Morris also looked at George’s collection of work by the painter Alexis Rockman, including the Shrike painting and the Evolution mural, and took them as partial inspiration, but “Rockman is about mutations, my work about impressions.”

In creating the Native Species cabinet vessels, “I used scavo [a technique that produces a corroded surface], etching, frost etching, and diamond-wheel engraving—but no sandblasting. . . . We laid needles together on a hot plate and picked them up on the vessels. The engraving work was new for us.” Sandblasting is a fast way to decorate glass, one Bill avoided. The artist must work outside an enclosed chamber in which the object rests, his hands in heavy plastic gloves inside as he directs a precision jet of sand against the surface of a vessel. The force of the sand striking the glass etches areas that are not protected. Aesthetically, sandblasting is problematic. The imprints of the grains of sand leave a bland and static one-dimensional surface, graying out any color beneath the blast zone. The hand of the artist is divorced from the stream of sand. The overall effect can be deadening. Sandblasted surfaces are the equivalent of pixilated or grainy photographs. Engraving is more flexible and its effects more subtle. The engraver holds the tool, a small rotating copper wheel or shaft with diamond tip, in his hand and presses into the object. He has a direct feel for the surface he engraves. Engraving can caress as it harrows; can achieve an effect of erosion, like eons of water over worn rocks. Engraving can be highlighted with polishing, or left dark and deep and rough as a gouge mark. It is a sculptor’s process.

Nature Rules

By choice Morris leads an insular life in the country; his preference is to go without television or the Internet. “Nature,” he says, “is the most genuine voice I hear. I am a product of nature, although I do not think of myself as an environmentalist. . . . The modern world is about thinking, but (for example) when I’m diving, I am not thinking. You can’t think your way into that place.”

“And glass?”

“Glass is not high technology. It is a primordial substance.”

“So why deny glass its shine in much of your work?”

“Shiny glass denies form—look at your eyeglasses—they mask rather than reveal.”

Of the Native Species vessels he created for Stroemple, Morris says: “It is the first substantial body of work I have made with two and three layers of glass. Beyond the challenges and subtlety of the technique, I wanted the immediate impression. If you ask ‘What kind of bird is that?’ I have failed.

“The central focus of my life is nature. And George gets it: humility in front of nature. If you don’t use a line of communication it becomes rusty. How clumsy we have become with the natural world. Most people, when a leaf falls, seldom stoop to inspect it. For me, hunting is a part of nature, it takes me into nature.

“Right now I am looking at a lenticular cloud over Mount Rainier, as opposed to what I am thinking about and talking about on the phone with you. So when you ask me about the environment, I have to say that feeling disheartened about the destruction of nature won’t help. I want to be in nature.” Bill ends our transcontinental phone conversation by reminding me, kidding me really, about a walk we took through the desert in Arizona, years ago, at night, when I was afraid of the dark. My fears and his nature.

Return to the Warehouse

In commissioning the Native Species series and suggesting that Bill look at the work of Emile Gallé, George was thinking of Gallé the naturalist, who wrote: “The love of the flower reigned in my family: it was hereditary passion. It was salvation.”6 After Gallé’s death, his widow noted that, if he had renewed the arts, it was because he had “studied plants, trees, flowers, both as an artist and a scholar.”7 Gallé surrounded his glass factory in Nancy, France, with gardens, and he assembled natural history collections for use in the studio. Nature, transmuted under his careful direction by the techniques of a skilled glassmaking team, became art. In 1889 Gallé wrote that to incarnate his dream he sought “to dress crystal in tender and terrible roles. . . . to order technique in the service of preconceived works of art.” All this while risking the “hazards of a craft in which fire collaborates.”8

Emile Gallé died in 1904, having created artworks that “would seem one day to have lived in their own time.”9 In the hyperrealistic way in which they incorporated nature and through their use of symbolism, his greatest works lived in the art nouveau era. For example, in 1900 at the Paris Universal Exposition, he exhibited a vase emblazoned with a bold thistle, for Gallé a patriotic symbol of the French region of Lorraine, where he lived and worked. Another vessel made around 1900 depicts what many admirers have called a “seahorse,” although it seems too elongated and of a strange ivory color. Showing a photograph of this vessel to a marine biologist, I learned that it resembles a leafy sea dragon from the ocean off the coast of Australia. But the ivory color seemed incorrect. After examining the vessel itself and by chance holding it in a very bright beam of transmitted light, I was fascinated to see the sea dragon’s body turn blood red—the correct color for this creature of the deep. Gallé had achieved the effect by using dichroic glass: glass that is one color in reflected light, another in transmitted light. It is as if the sea dragon were alive in one kind of light and petrified in, or perhaps by, another light.

A precise one-hundred-year interval separates the death of Gallé from the creation of the Native Speciesseries. Nature continues to inspire us, but her symbolic value is, of course, different. In 1892, Gallé created the Pasteur Coupe, an “inoculated” glass, symbolically infected with formidable microbes, in honor of the seventieth birthday of Louis Pasteur and his “fertile doctrine of germs.”10 In 2006, as our understanding of nature deepens and becomes more precise, we seem also to be distancing ourselves from nature in our everyday lives. We inhabit a world where the molecular structure of at least some of Pasteur’s germs has been decoded, andsimultaneously, in a world where nature is popularly caricatured and cartooned by artists who create cuddly creatures like Bambi and Nemo. Our relationship to nature has never been deeper or more superficial. You might say that we have learned that nature is negotiable: flexible, navigable, open to modification: something hunters have known for eons.

Morris and Stroemple may have set out at first to collect some sample specimens from around where they live and to memorialize these in glass, but they have also literally westernized Gallé. They collected specimens, such as pine needles and acorns, from the American West in Washington State and on Steens Mountain in Oregon; Morris and his team adapted Gallé’s techniques to the modern glass studio. This process is not unlike Gallé’s careful attention to the facts of nature and the techniques of making art, but the results are uniquely of their location and time. In the Native Species series, in its fusion of the vernacular of the American West, the softness of studio animation, and the compelling prowess of American studio glass, Morris has created artworks that will one day seem to have lived out West in our era.

Fact cannot corrupt taste. . . . the real corrupters are those who supply opinion or fancy.

—T. S. Eliot

The thirty-eight vessels in Native Species are the founding facts of this series. Moving beyond the warehouse, past the biographical details of Morris and Stroemple, through the aspects of nature that inspired the commission, and emerging at the furnace where they were forged and tempered, we are prepared again to experience the artworks. There are some obvious limitations. For example, in all my work I have never seen any of the Native Species in daylight. Compensation for viewing them in the warehouse is that I am able to touch them and hold them in my hands and look inside the vessels, literally, through their openings. But daylight is denied to me.

How should we negotiate the Native Species? We might want to wander among the vessels as you would through a field filled with different species of plant and animal life. This could be in the wide-open and highly dramatic spaces of the Steens or in an urban park or a museum. Wandering is nice because it is how we tend to approach nature. We have a trumpet vine on the side of our home: every spring it grows as if in a rain forest, and by fall it must be pruned and tamed. As I prune I discover the remains of summer life: hornets’ and birds’ nests, even the occasional black snake that has taken up residence. Pruning need not be an especially directed or organized process: you follow the thick and woody stems, and they lead you to the parts that can be pruned, and then the wispy parts that can pulled out by hand. This mixture of a plan (pruning) and distraction (discovering the snake) is how I think we might approach Stroemple’s commission.

The world of the Native Species includes a ghostly defiant thistle (shades of Gallé?), antelopes, cedars, oak and maple leaves falling in autumn, a grove of aspens and a stand of poplars, dragonflies and wild grasses, ring-necked pheasants, Canada geese preening, California quail amid seed pods, a shrike surrounded by its collection of carrion, intricate pines and needles, berry bushes, beetles and centipedes, lizards and desert artifacts, and sleek and curious chipmunks.

Everyday vases might be used to hold a bouquet of flowers. But the Native Species vessels are not everyday vases. They are magical, although magic is seemingly everywhere discredited as a trickster’s craft. So let’s think of them as the work of a wizard, as in Wizard of Oz: a creator who is at work behind the scenes. You might regard any one of these vessels, for example the Wild Grass vase (cat. 00 <no. 1>), as if it were an unembellished object set down in an open field of wild grass. Imagine that it then absorbed the impression of the grass into its surface before being taken back to the warehouse. This is perhaps a dreamy way to describe what in reality happened: Morris walked with Stroemple through the fields, absorbing impressions. He then brought specimens and his impressions back to the studio and at the furnace performed alchemy: the glass absorbed the wild grass through his skill. (Alchemy, by the way, is a branch of science that is underrated today because it was overestimated in the Renaissance. Alchemy is not about turning lead into gold. It is about turning glass into grass.) In making Wild Grass and all the others, wizardlike skill is essential. There are today thousands upon thousands of artists making glass in studios, and many draw inspiration from nature. Nature has once again become fashionable in the art world. Among American glassblowers, Morris is probably the best. His skill and his ability to assemble a skillful team allow him to navigate between technical jargon and artistic cant in order to create meaningful art that leaves an impression upon the viewer.

Morris makes his work in the hotshop at the Pilchuck Glass School. Furnaces there contain fiery orange batches of molten glass, glory holes for reheating the glass, and annealers that cool finished works slowly to relieve stresses that have built up in the glass. Blowing glass requires a team, including Morris as the gaffer (the hot-shot glassblower in control of the team) and Jon Ormbrek, adept at interpreting Morris’s sketches and translating them into images made from powdered glass (also called sand or frit drawings) that are fused into the vessels. Randy Walker is an extra pair of hands who assists Morris in the hotshop, and Rik Allen engraves and cuts the work after it has been annealed.11 The tools in the hotshop include blowpipes, punty rods, puffers, crushers, jacks with round or teardrop blades, put-away tongs, shears, paddles, pipe brushes, and yokes. The gaffer works seated at a bench or standing at a marver table: a small table with a thick steel top upon which the molten gather of glass, at the end of the pipe, can be rolled and shaped. Glassblowing requires the artist to become adept at recognizing and balancing extremes of temperature. In order to work the glass, it must be molten, but more like taffy and less like honey—if it is too liquid it will flow off the blowpipe. The gaffer works the glass on the pipe and reheats the glass in the glory hole. At the bench, Morris might use compressed air to cool a section of the emerging artwork or a blowtorch to heat the mass of glass. Shears or scissors may be used to cut away parts of the molten glass; graphite paddles can be used to shape the glass, as can wet newspapers pressed against the molten gather of glass as it is rotated.

Bits of glass may be shaped and added to the emerging molten vessel; for example a gobbet of glass may be shaped into a smooth acorn, decorated with crushed-glass colors in order to mimic the rough texture of the acorn’s cap, and then applied hot to the vessel. This process is repeated over and over again if the vessel is to display an intricate leaf and acorn relief (as in cat. 00 <no. 25>).

Multiple layers of glass introduce a richly textured atmosphere into the Native Species series. The ancient Romans created cameo glasses when they cased (covered) a bubble of deep blue glass with white glass and then, when it was cold, cut back the white to create marble-like figures against a lapis-blue ground. Gallé used a rich variety of casing and layering techniques in his important, complex, and costly creations. The most prominent of the layering techniques developed since Gallé’s work is called the “graal (as in Holy Grail) technique.” Associated with Swedish glass factories, especially Orrefors, it was inspired by Gallé, who had exhibited his work in Stockholm in 1897. The Scandinavians saw Gallé’s most imaginative creations as arcane, frenzied, even ugly, and graal glass was a moderated and simplified reaction to his perceived excesses. In the Native Species, Morris revived and extended the technical traditions of Gallé and Orrefors, as well as those of other art nouveau–era artists and factories including Daum.

The result of this mingling of techniques is Morris’s ability to create a rich vessel wall, to create, using Gallé’s word, an inoculated glass. Although many art mediums allow the artist to capture detail minutely, glass, because of its transparency, is among the few substances that allow the artist to sculpt detail inside the mass of the material and have it visible. When glass is also layered, the sculpting takes advantage of an artistic decision-making process about how much of the interior to reveal and what should remain concealed.

In the Native Species series we encounter three types of sculpting. Jon Ormbrek does his work before the hot glass is gathered, creating glass frit drawings that inoculate the interiors of the walls of some of the vessels with, for example, shadowy leaves apparently floating in space (see cat. 00 <no. 10>). You know that these are inoculated leaves because your hand cannot touch them. In other vessels, the leaves are on the surface and, if you run a fingertip over them, you’ll feel their fritty, sandy texture. Rik Allen sculpts after the glass has cooled, with a handheld engraving tool, such as a diamond bit, that slowly carves away the glass. He can create a delicate maple leaf from two or three layers of glass by eroding the layers. Some of Rik’s jagged edges and color-cutting combinations bear a striking resemblance to the pale greens and sharp silhouettes of Steens Mountain(see cat. 00 <no. 12> and fig. 7). Controlling the whole process is Morris as gaffer, who, with the team in the hotshop, sculpts a third way, by preparing hot bits of glass to be applied to the surfaces of the vessels. These might be pulled threads of greenish glass that have been cut into segments: once applied to the surface of a vessel, they become pine needles. Or they could be laboriously worked individual acorns or maple leaves or pine cones.

Rose is a rose is a rose

—Gertrude Stein

What have Morris and Stroemple given us in the Native Species? Gertrude Stein, in reference to her famous remark about the rose, said: "I think in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years."12 Like Stein, Morris is fond of repetition, thrives on it: thirty-eight Native Species vessels, innumerable acorns and oak leaves and blades of grass and pine needles. What have artist and collector given us? Something finally pretty simple: “Pine is a pine is a pine.”

Notes

1. T. S. Eliot, “The Perfect Critic,” in Eliot: Poems and Prose (New York: Knopf, 1998), 155.

2. William Warmus, Emile Gallé: Dreams into Glass, exh. cat. (Corning, N.Y.: Corning Museum of Glass, 1989), 188–89.

3. Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London: Continuum, 2004), 277.

4. T. S. Eliot, “Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets, in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), 137.

5. William Morris, interview by author, summer 2005. Throughout this essay, comments by William Morris are taken from this interview.

6. Emile Gallé, Ecrits pour l’Art (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1908), 239.

7. Ibid., vi.

8. Warmus, Emile Gallé, 188–89.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., 49–51.

11. [Names of all team members TK]

12. Gertrude Stein, Four in America, TK

___________________________

Captions for comparative figures

Figure 1. William Morris, Cache, 1993. * Stroemple Collection, W.M.017.

Figure 2. William Morris, Canopic Jar Group, 1992. * Stroemple Collection, W.M. 009-012.

Figure 3. William Morris, Artifacts Series #6 (First Fruit), 1988. * Stroemple Collection, W.M. 007.

<Q: or, possibly: First Fruit, from Artifacts Series, #6 ?>

Figure 4. Emile Gallé, Pines Vase, 1903. * The Corning Museum of Glass, <acc. no. TK?>

Figure 5. Emile Gallé, Dragonfly Coupe, 1903. * The Corning Museum of Glass, <acc. no. TK?>

Figure 6. Alexis Rockman, Evolution, 1992. <media?>, 96 x 288 in. Stroemple Collection.

Figure 7. William Warmus, photograph of Steens Mountain, Oregon, 2005.

<Q: * Please supply media and dimensions.>