Murano

it's been a long time friends!  Some of you (well, one of you anyway) requested an update and a sharing of my recent travel adventures to the lovely island of Murano. 

Murano is a small island near Venice. A little history: in 1291 Murano became the only place in The Most Serene Republic (Venice area) authorized to manufacture glassware.  This was largely due to a well founded fear that the glassworks on Venice could result in fire and great damage, but also as a means for Venice to control their virtual monopoly on fine glassware that they traded around the world to great financial benefit.   They managed to protect their exclusive trade in, at that time, the world's finest glass by closely controlling and protecting their glassworking trade secrets for many, many years and even today there are still a few Muranese who strongly feel that sharing glass working techniques with foreigners is somewhat treasonous to their livelihood and traditions. Luckily for me, Lucio Bubacco is not one of them.

The centerpiece of the trip was a 5 day workshop with the incomparable Lucio Bubacco, a world renown glass artists (click on his name to see the gallery on his website) at Scuola Bubacco.   The trip was arranged in the States by one of his long time acquaintances, Ofilia Cinta.  It was quite an international group. We had people from Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Turkey and the US in the workshop.  Below is one of the pieces he made to demonstrate his techniques for making sculpture with "soft glass" (as opposed to "hard glass",  borosilicate which is what the majority of American glass sculptors use).  I could go on and on about the differences between the various glasses, but I won't bore you with all that now.

In addition to learning a tremendous amount with Lucio, we also had an incredibly unique opportunity to visit many other glass artists in their private studios and talk with them about their art and see them work up close.  Below is another fabulous artist, Davide Salvadore, creating the latest in his series of almost life size human/animal busts at the furnace.

He is carefully aligning all the separately prepared murrini (cut cross-sections of patterned cane) that have been wrapped around a core of molten glass.  They will spend many hours carefully reheating, then gently melting everything to a uniform finish and shaping it into the final desired form.  This process takes many hours of intense labor in very hot conditions, but the end results are worth it.

Ok, that's it for tonight, but rest assured I have lots more stuff to write about and pictures to share. 

Ciao