THE CANADIAN SOCIETY OF DECORATIVE ARTS
The Canadian Society of Decorative Arts/ Cercle canadien des arts décoratifs was formed, with the generous support of the Macdonald Stewart Foundation, to provide a forum for all those interested in the decorative arts.
The Ontario Arts Council is an Agency of the Government of Ontario
the art of warren carther
glass + steel
Tammy Sutherland
click image to enlarge
Many an auspicious journey has begun with a moment of epiphany, of ‘seeing the light’. Few, however, can claim this to be the case quite literally. Into this elite category falls Warren Carther, an artist whose life-long love of glass was initiated by a serendipitous encounter with what he now refers to as a “less than noteworthy” light fixture-cum-modernist-sculpture by architect Gustavo da Roza.
Reflecting back on a distinguished 35+ year career as an architectural and sculptural glass artist, Carther recalls the day he toured the newly built Winnipeg Art Gallery with a friend and first saw the da Roza piece, a collection of glass globes suspended from crisscrossing bars, installed over the table in the cordoned-off boardroom. So impressed was he that for days to come, Carther would ruminate on what he saw as the fantastic properties of glass: its transparency, its brittleness, its mystery. His insights into the phenomenal potential of glass— the ability to work with colour, movement and light, the sculptural possibilities—fuelled his growing preoccupation with the material and soon set him on a course of study that would have him blowing glass, first for a summer with Bill Carlson, then under master artist Marvin Lipofsky at California College of the Arts and Crafts.
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