Peter Vanderlaan

Mary Beth Bliss

Peter VanderLaan

Born: Boston MA, 1950 Tuscon AZ, 1952

Education: 1967: St. John's College, Santa Fe, NM 1976: BA, St. John's College, Santa Fe, NM

Peter VanderLaan and Mary Beth Bliss began collaborating on hot glass pieces in 1979. Their earliest work was a series of beautiful forms blown by Peter with Mary Beth's etched glass drawings melted into a brilliant matte lustre surface. A remarkable spectrum of design possibilities was explored both jointly and separately by both artists over the ensuing years: carved pieces, laminated pieces, beveled glass, etched glass, functional glass and sculptural glass. Yet no matter how far they journeyed into the labyrinth of possibilities offered by glass, they never forgot those early figured pieces.In a process based on her earlier work, Bliss has taken dichroic sheet glass and produced complex graphics in it. Coupled up with sheet glass made by her husband, the patterns have yielded a dazzling new line of jewelry, and some remarkable composite layering of imagery in Peter's blown forms. Today the couple is producing a series of blown forms, paperweights and jewelry utilizing Bliss's etched dichroic creations that totally challenges the limits of the current use for dichroic glass, while celebrating the forms wrought by VanderLaan's quarter century of immersion in glass.

Statement by Peter VanderLaan
"I have been hopelessly addicted to glass as a material for the last twenty-odd years. I have rolled up crushed car windshields and melted them, stripped putty and aluminum siding from salvage glass and melted it, screened arroyo sand and melted it, and have derived sophisticated formulas using food grade lime in the middle of the pacific ocean and melted that. I have melted volcanic rock. I have thrown snowballs into my furnaces for hours. I have been disappointed and elated by glass all in the same minute. I am always drawn back to it. My current work challenges the perceptions of conventional beveled glass. Beveled glass is usually very symmetrical and rigid. It dazzles, but looks like costume jewelry. I want to break away from the symmetric and make the viewer wonder what part is glass and what part is not. I want a tension in the work that screams "fragile" when it in fact is very strong. I also want an illusion that makes the viewer wonder whether what they are looking at is really there. I especially love the reactions from other glassworkers. These pieces are fun and I really like having fun. In 1985, I took a job supervising thirteen fire departments for Santa Fe County. I blew glass in the evenings and on weekends. It was the first time in my life that I had been able to simply design in glass without worrying about selling the pieces. That was a tremendous freeing experience for me. I left the fire service in 1988 to return to glass full-time and I am happily continuing to make design my primary consideration."