Dale Chihuly ad Kew Gardens

Dale Chihuly's great glass blowing structures with, according to his biography ' ' highly baroque, writhing elements' are being displayed at the Kew Royal Gardens (click here to view the BBC's picture log of them.

Dale, who grew up outside of Seattle in Tacoma, has an interesting educational history; He studied at University of Wisconsin (madison, I'm assuming) in the nations first glass blowing sculpture program. He then went to RISD's ceramics program where he in turn created its glass department. He is responsible for establishing blown glass as an art form in the US.

We have his glass 'sunburst' (clever use of orange glass on the inside) in the lobby ofthe MIA in Minneapolis. The picture at the top up there is actually not from the Kew site, but from the Sheraton Walker Hill hotel in Seoul(here's a larger image. I stayed at this hotel, and I was giddy, beyond there amazing spa area, wine bar, two storied lobby with a harpist and flutist, to see this great piece hanging in nestled among the huge plants in the lobby. It really is true that these pieces look great with plants (hence so many pieces in conservatories and gardens, etc.) I just wanted to put it in here.

The minimalist in me doesn't want to like these, but these are a total exception (besides the one at the Walker-Hill is all shades of white; the one at Kew isn't as 'pure') Some of the pieces at Kew, frankly, do detract from the garden itself, as some of the passer by's commented, so they aren't a total success. Chihuly does better in abstraction; his plant personification stuff just falls flat into theme parkish-ness.