Christopher Ries Glass For Sale

Christopher Ries Biography

Early Life and Artistic Foundation

Christopher Ries (born 1952) grew up on a farm in Central Ohio. The son of Raymond and Mildred Ries, he became interested in art and ceramics as a young adult. While in high school, Chris Ries produced pottery in his parents’ cellar that he used as a makeshift studio.

Education and Glass Discovery

In 1971, Ries began a Fine Arts degree in ceramics at Ohio State University. There he honed his skills in glazing pottery and the glass used to glaze ceramics. In his exploration of working with glass, he built a glass studio at the university. Thus becoming the first instructor as an undergraduate student. He studied types of glass, their chemical properties, compositions and blowing glass. He then graduated in 1975.

When he was in his senior year, Ries attended a visiting guest lecturer, Harvey Littleton. The lecturer was struck by the accomplishments of the young man as both a glass teacher and as a glass artist. Ries was invited to work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as Littleton’s research assistant. With the offer accepted, Christopher Ries began working there from the next autumn.

Ries’s mentorship under Littleton lasted two years. In this time, his interest in the optical properties of glass grew and he started experimenting with cold glass carvings. Before this, he had focused on hot glass blowing. There weren’t specific glass-carving tools for sculpting cold glass at the time. So, Ries developed a lot of the necessary glass sculpting equipment himself. In 1978, Christopher Ries graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Master’s in Fine Arts. He then returned to his home town in Columbus, OH.

Professional Development and Schott Partnership

After he graduated, Christopher Ries began researching the best glass for sculpture. His search led to him discovering Schott Optical (Schott North America) lead crystal. He would travel to buy cullet from Schott in Duryea, Pennsylvania. He continued to source glass from Schott over the course of the next two years. With his pieces of cullet, he would sculpt and carve in his Columbus studio. Here, he would also polish the pieces to completion.

After developing his technique, he impressed Dr. Franz Herkt, Schott’s President. They invited him to work as Artist in Residence for Schott Optical. He signed a contract in 1986 and worked with Schott to produce a body of work at the Duryea facility. Here he worked there as a non-salaried independent contractor. He left after his on-site studio was destroyed by fire in March 2015. This fire also ended Ries’s relationship with Schott.

A lot of the masterpieces he produced at Schott were made after he created forms in a private studio he established in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania. And this studio is still in operation. Ries’s private studio is also where he worked with other mediums like paint and wood.

Artistic Technique and Optical Innovation

Christopher Ries glass sculptures have a technical proficiency. Meaning, they can change optical compositions internally. The artist uses a clear lead crystal for his works. This glass has a very high refractive index, excellent homogeneity and light transmission. The properties of this glass enable him to create these complex optical effects.

When Ries begins a project, he starts with a large block of optical glass. The glass is then reduced to its art form through a process of cutting, grinding, carving and polishing. Some of his largest sculptures weigh over 4,000 pounds. It can take as much as a year to reduce and polish a glass sculpture.

Art critic, professor James Yood at Northwestern University described Christopher Reis glass as “an art of such suggestiveness and finesse, of ceaseless transition and surprise that it constitutes one of the most intriguing exercises in the poetics of optics anywhere in contemporary art.” Ries has won many accolades and his work is exhibited in museums and major collections across the U.S., Japan and Europe.

Major Works and Recognition

Christopher Ries glass is the largest collection of crystal sculpture. Ries’s chef-d’oeuvre was the largest monolithic glass sculpture in the world. Weighing almost 680 kilograms (1,500 pounds), it was sculpted from a block of glass weighing 3,000 pounds. Ries’s Sunflower IV is one of his most famous sculptures. This weighs 1,100 pounds and it took around four months and over 1,800 hours to carve.

Legacy and Artistic Philosophy

When describing his work, Ries has used the phrase “vessel for light” to describe his pieces. In speaking of his glass sculptures, he said; “all that we know about the universe, the composition of the stars, and the distances within the universe are studied through light…It is the one medium that gathers, focuses, amplifies, transmits, filters, diffuses and reflects it. It is the quintessential medium for light. I see it all on a symbolic level.”

Christopher Ries has four children: Banks, Chase, Catherine and Caroline.

Manuel Neri Biography

Manuel Neri (Born 1930 )

Manuel Neri is one of the greatest living sculptors, having influenced his own generation and every one since. One of the surviving members of the “second generation” of Bay Area Figurative artists, Neri maintained a prominence in the art scene in San Francisco for decades.

He was born in Sanger, California on April 12th 1930 to Mexican immigrant parents. He was influenced and taught by Bay Area artists such as Elmer Nelson Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell and David Park. This was during his brief studies at the California School of Fine Arts while in his twenties. He admired their attempts to combine abstract expressionism and a rediscovered interest in the human body and form.

His first forays into abstract sculpture in the early 50’s used junk materials like wire, burlap and cardboard. He then migrated to plaster, a medium he used for years to come in his unique figurative sculptures. He became known for his erotic and naturalistic sculptures of the female body. Sculptures rendered in rough plaster and often accentuated with a powerful splash of color, painted on with great energy.

Manuel Neri also experimented with bronze and marble for his sculptures. He purchased a studio in Italy in 1981 to so he could work with marble, as well as produce beautiful abstract figure pastels and paintings.

From 1959, Manuel Neri was teaching at the California School of Fine Arts, and taught for a while at UC Berkeley. From 1965 until 1999 he was a member of the art department at UC Davis, having his own studio in Benicia, California during the same time.

Artist Manuel Neri has used mostly the same model for the last 40 years, Mary Julia Kilmenko. He continues to produce sculptures, paintings and drawings, though his recent output has diminished. Commissioned to provide sculptures for institutions such as the State of California, Iowa State University, a courthouse in Portland, Oregon and more. Manuel Neri’s art is on display in venues across the United States and the world.

His artwork is also in several important museums in America. Two of note are The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Manuel Neri’s artwork has a revolutionary feel and a timeless quality. He was influential in his lengthy career, and as time passes he continues to be one of the great American sculptors.

DOUGLAS ABDELL BIOGRAPHY

Douglas Abdell (born 1947)

Born to a Lebanese father and an Italian mother in Boston, MA in 1947, Douglas Abdell has emerged as one of the most distinctive and recognizably unique sculptors in metal. They combine his mixed heritage along with a keen sense of the social and political issues of his times. Douglas Abdell sculptures are some of the most lasting and impressive sculptures of the late 20th century.

It has been said that Douglas Abdell sculptures invoke a similar feeling to those of ancient monuments like Stonehenge. Using massive and mysterious shapes to induce the viewer with a feeling of something indefinable. His works are both immediately socially impacting and thought provoking in an unusual manner.

Abdell Art Influences

Language and its construction have influenced many Douglas Abdell sculptures, which he likens to poems. From his earliest studies to his latest works, there is a linguistic theme that runs through everything. Calling on his Middle Eastern and Italian heritage, he started to explore Phoenician and Arabic use of symbols. Blending them and creating a new language that he used to describe and explain his works. As nobody else spoke the language, it did not clear up the intention of the work to anyone who was trying to figure it out logically. Only when the emotionality of the words were focused on did things become clearer. Even then, it confused a lot of people!

Like language, landscape is a continuing theme of Douglas Abdell sculptures. His immediate surroundings, and the landscapes of his past are mixed and refashioned in his artwork. Any sculpture has to be created with an awareness of the place it will stand. How people will see it and interact with it is almost as important as the sculpture. Douglas Abdell knows this, and cleverly weaves the themes of landscape and location into his metal work.

Beginning his sculpture study in the late 60’s at Syracuse University, Douglas Abdell never was going to do things conventionally. After getting his BFA, he retreated from the world and made his first major work, The Yads. Vaguely humanoid, but made entirely from metal, they are three legs attached to a box with an antenna sticking out the top. Douglas Abdell’s experiments with the color black led him to use the contrast of darkness against the polished metal surfaces of his metal sculpture. He said it gave them “weight”.

The 1970s

His 1973 work, the Kryads, was the first introduction of his invented language, “Phoenaes”. He would compose prose and poetry in Phoenaes, and in his book Kryad Poems, tells us why: “to remember what was happening when I made these particular sculptures and speaking about it in a language and rhythm that wants to approach their nature”.

Douglas Abdell sculpture and language are his way of communicating in a way he could not in English. It is a form of metalanguage, above other language, a more primal and directly communicative form of expression than the context-laden language we use every day.

In 1977, Douglas Abdell created the Aekyad series of sculptures, which drew heavily on geometric form. Alluding to figurative and geometric ideas, they initially had a great sense of movement. As time passed, the series became more static and minimalist. You could interpret this series as minimalist, but you would be missing the depth and complexity to the intention behind them.

The 1980s

Briefly in the 1980’s, he experimented with oil painting, acrylics, and collage in mixed media. He soon turned back to metal and stone.

Ear Less Full is a work from 1983 that has characters from English and Chinese incorporated into it, taking the implied sense of linguistic communication to a more immediate and obvious stage. He was working in New York at the time and the vast, human and inhuman landscape is a large part of the inspiration for this work. They summon the time and place beautifully.

The 1990s

By the 1990s, Douglas Abdell was living and working in Spain. This is a place where the Phoenicians had traded extensively. The earliest Celtic writing is found here in a Phoenician script. Abdell immersed himself in the study of this ancient Semitic script and later in Arabic. Taking elements of the languages, Douglas Abdell transformed them into sculpture, always taking inspiration from his environment as he created. He suggests an ancient feeling. The Phoenician seafaring culture is seen clearly in Magreb-Punic from 1995. It combines the “chaos and fragmentation” of modern times with the grace of the lines of an ancient boat.

Later, Douglas Abdell started to understand the Mediterranean through his work. M=AGUA and onwards are series that use an increasingly informal technique with concepts as diverse as Newtonian physics, karma, philosophy, and modern commentary on Mediterranean issues and conflicts.

From casting bronzes to welding, linguistic experimentation and invention to philosophical commentary on modern times, Douglas Abdell sculptures explore blended and enlightened ancient cultures. In the process, Douglas Abdell has cast a strong light on 20th and 21st century sculpture and linguistics.

Douglas Abdell Today

He still lives in Spain, where his latest exhibition at the Museum of Cadiz in 2018 was well received. Douglas Abdell sculptures are highly collectible. He is considered a highly influential figure in modern sculpture. His name is not as well known as some, but it is unlikely to be lost in the depths of time.

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI BIOGRAPHY

Alberto Giacometti (1901 – 1966)

Artist Alberto Giacometti was born in Switzerland. He was the oldest of four children and the son of a Post-Impressionist painter. When he was about ten, he started drawing with pencil and pastel and many of those drawings exist today. The young Alberto Giacometti then started to try different things with oils and still-life paintings and regularly used his family members as models.

He was enrolled in an Evangelical School in the town of Schiers in 1915. There Giacometti continued his artwork in a small private studio and he later took art classes in Geneva at the École des Arts Industriels. He was taught painting, drawing and sculpture under the Pointillist artist David Estoppey and the sculptor Maurice Sarkissoff. In 1920, he went to Italy with his father and was very interested in the works of the old masters. Before long he moved to Paris, was drawn to Cubism and enrolled in several art classes. By the 1930s, Alberto Giacometti was part of the Surrealist art movement and he got to be near artists like Joan Miró, André Masson, Man Ray and Max Ernst.

Alberto Giacometti and his sibling Diego fled Paris in June 1940, barely missing the attacking German army. Giacometti stayed in France, became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir whos friendship would impact his figurative work. In 1946, Giacometti was able to return to Paris and his previous significant other, Annette Arm, went along with him, and the two were married in 1949. As Alberto Giacometti’s style kept on maturing, his bronze figures became larger and larger. His Woman of Venice II (1956) was almost four feet tall, and his Tall Woman II (1960) was nearly nine feet tall.

Alberto Giacometti was globally renowned by the 1960s, but unfortunately his health was not good. He was tormented by heart and circulatory issues but yet he pressed on with producing his artwork. On the night of January 11, 1966, the artist passed way from complications of pericarditis.

JOHN McCRACKEN BIOGRAPHY

John Harvey McCracken (1934 – 2011)

John McCracken artist, sculptor and painter was known for his ability to create compelling work out of what he terms basic forms. John Harvey McCracken is associated with the contemporary art scene in California, Santa Fe, New Mexico and with innovating the American art scene at large.

His most famous works are created out of dark, lacquered shapes polished to a high shine. They constitute basic geometric forms, of which color is considered by the artist to be the vital component of their construction. This innovative use of color as an aspect of form is widely considered to be John McCracken’s principal innovation and the defining element of his work.

John Harvey McCracken attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and has taught throughout the country at colleges in the University of California System was well as at The University of Nevada, Hunter College, New York and the School of Visual Arts in New York.

His art is a part of the permanent collections in a great many noteworthy museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which currently holds two of his pieces.

John McCracken lived and worked in Santa Fe, NM and New York. After being ill for almost a year, he passed away in Manhattan at the age of 76.

ROBERT ARNESON BIOGRAPHY

Robert Carston Arneson (1930 – 1992)

Robert Arneson was born in Benicia, California, a small coastal town located North of the Carquinez Strait in the San Francisco Bay Area. Arneson is widely-admired for his groundbreaking work in ceramics which he believed should not be constrained by utilitarian concerns. Robert Arneson exhibited artistic talent at a very young age.

This willingness to break boundaries and the wry sense of humor that infuses much of his art brought him notoriety as being among California’s “Funk” artists. Robert Arneson created several self-portraits in mixed media, including mirrors, photography and drawings, each of which presented the artist in a different way and, sometimes, seemed to suggest a different personality. A studied artist, however, Robert Arneson was the recipient of a Master’s of Fine Arts from Mills College in 1958. By 1962 he was serving as the Head of the UC Davis Ceramics Department and he became a full professor of ceramics at UC Davis in 1973.

Though known for his irreverence and forever associated with the groundbreaking art of California, the artist had a somber side that expressed itself in his later works. In the 1980’s, Robert C. Arneson suffered with liver cancer and the darkness of that time is reflected in his works of that era.

Robert Carston Arneson passed away Nov 2, 1992 at his home in Benicia, CA. He was 62 years old.

JAMES BROWN BIOGRAPHY

James Brown (1951 – 2020)

James Brown artist and painter was active in Paris and Oaxaca (Mexico). He was most understood in the 1980s for his harsh painterly semi-allegorical works of art, bearing affinities to Jean-Michel Basquiat and East Village painting of the time, yet with impacts from primitive craftsmanship and established Western innovation.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, artist James Brown received a BFA from Immaculate Heart College, Hollywood. He then invested years in Paris, and went to the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris, France. He defied the established preparing there, which he considered unimportant, yet stayed as he needed to stay in Paris. Voyages through Europe seeing renaissance and particularly medieval painting of Italy impacted his work. Amid the 1980s, James Brown art blended the pioneer convention of painterly application and adherence to the photo surface with clear impacts from tribal workmanship.

In the mid 1980s artist James Brown started displaying paintings and artwork in New York, and in this decade his work turned into a hit in the exhibitions and workmanship press, offering a look to the Bad Painting and youthful neo-expressionism of the East Village painters of the time. On the twelfth of September 1987 he wedded Alexandra Condon, who was concentrating on Art History at NYU at the time. At the time, they had know one another for more than ten years.

In spite of some time on the East and West shore of New York, artist James Brown kept living in Paris. With the East’s blurring Village workmanship scene he had progressively appeared in European exhibitions, where his work was presently found in the setting of a post-war European innovation in the custom of Jean Dubuffet. James Brown and Alexandra had their first offspring, Degenhart Maria Gray Brown, on the 24th of September 1989 in New York. In 1991 their second child, Cosmas And Damian Maria Todosantos Brown, was conceived on the sixth of June in Paris. On the sixteenth of April 1993, their third little girl was born, Dagmar Maria Jane Brown, in New York.

In 1995, artist James Brown moved out to the valley of Oaxaca (Mexico) with his family, where they lived in a Hacienda for a long time. Amid this time James Brown art was continually displayed in Europe, the United States and in Mexico. Artist James Brown and his wife worked together with different specialists, making carpets in a town in the mountains of Oaxaca. The floor coverings were made in the conventional Mexican style, weaved by hand on extensive wooden casings. James Brown and Alexandra then chose to begin making books with craftsmen, so they began Cape Diem Press. Like the carpets, these books are imprinted in Oaxaca utilizing antiquated and customary systems. The books are imprinted in constrained versions, and Carpe Diem Press keeps on teaming up with specialists. In 2004 James Brown moved his family to the city of Mérida, in the Yucatán. From that point forward artist James Brown has been investing much energy in Europe, displaying his work in France, Germany, Italy and Holland. He has been working generally in Paris.

James Brown has tackled a few styles throughout the years, he does however keep up a hand-made look consolidating worries of the innovator convention with themes and otherworldly hobbies from tribal workmanship. A lot of James Brown art contains portrayals or indications of unmistakable confronts or questions. All the more, he has recently accomplished more artwork in a conceptual mode. Then again, the line in the middle of representation and reflection is regularly a troublesome one in his work. For example, his later Firmament Series – Abstract Canvas that can likewise be perused as alluding to heavenly bodies or stars, or gatherings of rocks.

Other than paintings, James Brown has additionally delivered figures and arrangement of prints at different times in his career. In the 1990s he began to intensely use collage. Drawing and other one of a kind works on paper have been vital to the advancement of James Brown art.

James Brown and his wife, Alexandra, died in an automobile accident in Mexico.

Artist Exhibitions:

• 1983 Tony Shafrazi, “Champions,” New York
• 1983 Nature Morte, New York
• 1985 Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland
• 1986 Leo Castelli, New York, New York
• 1995 Leo Castelli, February, New York
• 2001 Pace Prints, February, Catalogue raisonne graphic work. New York
• 2005 Ex-Escuela Quintana Roo, “James Brown 10 acos en Oaxaca,” Mérida, Mexico. (This exhibition traveled internationally)
• 2007 Galerie Karsten, Greve Paris (Showing his abstract “Firmament Series”)
• 2014 Livingstone Gallery, The Hague (NL)

NATHAN OLIVEIRA BIOGRAPHY

Nathan Oliveira (1928 – 2010)

Born Nathan Joseph Roderick, he would become well known as the artist Nathan Oliveira. He was born December 19, 1928 in Oakland, California. His father immigrated from Portugal with the last name Rodrigues, but later changed it to Roderick. About the artist’s last name of Oliveira, he took it from his mother’s second husband who was also a Portuguese immigrant.

In the late 1940s, San Francisco was a perfect place for poets, musicians and artists, so Nathan Oliveira moved there. He became a member of the Bay Area figurative school. This group consisted of artists such as Elmer Bichoff, David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. These artists had absorbed Abstract Expressionism, but landscape and figurative painting were the main points of their work. But, the style of Nathan Oliveira sculpture and paintings are difficult to categorize.

Nathan Oliveira Paintings

Nathan Oliveira paintings were abstract and painted with a brushy style. His painting and sculpture reflects influence of European artists such as Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti.

Another influence was from Max Beckmann, the German painter. Nathan Oliveira studied with him and in a 1992 interview said: “There was a power that was emanating from his painting that was far more potent than what I was recognizing in most things I was seeing, and I wanted this”. “That made sense to me, that was the influence.”

Oliveira’s paintings are a bit different from his colleagues paintings of the figurative school. Although he used to work with vivid colors, he was a bit more committed to the darker side.

Nathan Oliveira used to take painting lessons from a marine artist. This later encouraged him to enroll in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. In the summer of 1950, he studied at Mills College also in Oakland. He graduated in 1951, and received his master’s degree one year later. After serving in the Army, he resided in San Francisco. He lived at the Presidio and started showing his work. Nathan Oliveira paintings were shown in a solo exhibition in 1958, at the Alan Gallery in Manhattan. In 1959, the new curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, Peter Selz, included Nathan Oliveira paintings in the exhibition called New Figures of Man. This brought him a huge success in a short period of time. Nathan Oliveira paintings were described as spontaneous, just like he “was finding the figure in the process of painting it”, as Mr. Selz once wrote about him.

But this new fame and its demands were too overwhelming for the artist. He was constantly working on producing new paintings and sculptures. This led to his physical exhaustion. There was also the appearance of Pop Art, a new movement at the time which began replacing his art. In an interview from 1978, Nathan Oliveira said: “I reached a dry spell, lacking in imagination, and the incentive seemed to be gone“. It was about this time that he began concentrating on prints, drawings and watercolors.

In 1965, Nathan Oliveira became a permanent member of the art department at Stanford University. There he taught studio art for almost 30 years and created a printmaking program.

Although his paintings didn’t always portray the human figure, he always returned to figurative paintings and they were quite intense. In 1970, he produced a painting called Standing Figure and this painting represents that intensity. It has a pink female figure without a face, turned toward the viewer with a white death mask. Also fascinating are his paintings with dancers and runners, with red and dark orange backgrounds. These paintings belong to the last decade of Nathan Oliveira’s paintings.

In the 1990s, Nathan Oliveira created the Stelae series of paintings. These works have vertical forms resembling the menhirs of Stonehenge, the solemn majesty of Egyptian obelisks or Han dynasty tomb posts. But they also resemble the artist’s earlier paintings with the isolated figures.

Nathan Oliveira paintings later included a series of large-scale landscapes called The Windhover. Named after a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The main figures on these landscapes are birds – red-tailed hawks and kestrels. These are birds the artist had the opportunity to observe very close to his painting studio.

In 2010, at the age of 81, artist Nathan Oliveira passed away in Palo Alto, CA.