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I'm not a great fan of glass art, for the main part my experience has been tainted by too many miserable weekends looking at churches and castles across Britain. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it now, but back then I wanted to jump off roofs and fight other boys with bamboo sticks, yes too many martial arts programmes most likely. But one thing that stayed with me, apart from the dirty panes, was just how dour most stained glass art felt at the time, and even now. Not that I'm a great fan of more modern and abstract interpretations, I like the middle ground, for instance the work of John La Farge and some of the glass work of the impressionists such as Monet evokes colour more than anything, and colour is always good, when handled correctly that is.

Still I'd rather glass sculpture any time, although then again even this oblique little corner of the arts can sink into something akin to gaudy if the artist has a tendency to be too expressive for their own good. I understand the attraction of antique glass l'objet d'art, such as Lalique, because whatever it is, you can always tell when it's the best of the best. But for the main part, sculpture seems more substantial for me when its rendered from metal or stone, or even wood to some degree. However time is a great healer, and circumstance can always offer the opportunity to look at art anew, and as it happens I did come across two outstanding artists who have made me reconsider my opinion, in fact they've melted it with a blowtorch and poured it into a visual mould of insanity. Meet Xia Xiao Wan and David Spriggs, two people who have changed many including my perception of exactly what can be achieved in with translucent materials.

Xia Xiao Wan

Xia Xiao Wan, born in Beijing 1959, graduated from the Third Studio of Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1982. He worked as Art Editor in China Machinery Publishing for a year and then he changed the world, or at the very least one perceptual level of it. Hi work speaks for itself, it is astoundingly evocative and mesmerising. The materials used simply add to the process of beguiling and hypnotic trancelike awe. To witness his work could only be topped by the experience of creating it, armed with little more than special pencils, tinted glass, and 14 to 30 glass panes Xia manages to break all  rules of painting. His work is more like that of an MRI Imaging machine than an artist, slicing reality into thin sheets of information, forming three dimensions from a series of two dimensional works.

A quote from the artist at ArtNet:

In Xia Xiaowan’s latest show, “Painting From the Inside,” “painting” is conceived of as both as a physical act and artistic outcome. Under such a pretext, Xia Xiaowan’s works seek to investigate and question the essence of painting as well as the process of creation, sensual perception and our observation of reality.Since his early drawings, master sketcher Xia Xiaowan has restlessly been pushing the boundaries of Western traditional realistic painting. His goal, in all of this, has been to explore, by means of expanded and diffracted viewpoints, a new and ‘true vision’ which goes beyond the principles of physics. Dating back to sketches from the late 80s and early 90s, Xia Xiaowan’s subjects are often depicted from unusual angles and sometimes even appear deformed. At the same time, they appear to float in space. In short, over time, his works have increasingly departed from objectivity, realism and a strictly two-dimensional plane. It was from 2003 that Xia Xiaowan’s works found their ‘true space,’ gaining a three-dimensional quality and materially becoming in-air, ’spacial paintings’.

 

Currently living in Beijing as a professor of Stagecraft Department of the Central Academy of Drama, and the member of the China Oil Painting Institute, Beijing Artists Association and Beijing Arts of Oil Painting Commission he is a man in demand. His work is instantly recognisable, and for me personally has forced a revaluation the way that all glass art can be interpreted.

David Spriggs
 

David Spriggs, born in Manchester, UK in 1978,  emigrated to Canada in 1992 and has lived and worked in Montreal ever since. His process is very similar to Wan except for the fact that he paints with acrylic on layered transparent plastic film, his thinking however takes a rather different tangent. His inspiration is film, not simply the images it can sequentially record, nor the emotional power it can evoke, but the idea of time, or rather the manipulation and even suspension of the temporal field. Spriggs' work explores the "moment", a remnant of history, a splice of consequence transfixed at the point of maximum effect.

Rather than animating through the medium of his "cells" he builds layers of film to create a 3D work that veers sharply towards a basic holography. Although both Wan and Spriggs are literally painters in their own field, I would suggest that Spriggs' work is more gestural and painterly, whilst Wan's is solid and sculptural. Each has their merits, although I do find the subject matter of Spriggs has the edge, if only in the fact that what he enables us to envision is in fact impossible to capture with the naked eye. His works have featured a comet, a tornado at its peak of ferocity and an eye, the assumed objectivity of his work only serving to add to the feeling of awe when witnessing his art. This is an artist who should be working on a far bigger scale as far as I am concerned. Spriggs' work reflects nature under the microscope, it would be nice to see it physically exist in the same space as the natural environments and forces that so pervade his imagery.

Translucency is the new opaque… by blurring the notions of dimensionality, these two artists provide a doorway into a higher register of perception. Light, colour and nature are their allies in a mission to extend reality into a space once unexplored. Nature sliced and diced and reassembled in a manner that can do no less than inspire the most hardened soul that there is something greater to this reality we call life. Next time something catches your eye, look deeper.

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Boo Ritson paint people, literally, and then she photographs them.

The results are stunning.

Paint it black

You can buy ‘The Trucker’ and more of Ritson’s fabulous work here: http://bit.ly/8fYrNK.

Want to know how it feels to be caked in paint?

‘Like Cher’, according to The Maccabees: http://bit.ly/7hVdBa.

Until next time.

The Wall Pimper

Check out my online gallery @ www.pimpyourwalls.co.uk

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