Western Living Magazine

Carther is one of the worlds most foremost architectural glass artists, and he continues to bag ever -more-prestigious commissions from under the feet of giants in the field. Embassies, airports, office towers: all have become defacto galleries with Carther's on permanent display. But today the power tools lie silent. Carther is waiting on a shipment of glass. In his cavernous studio in Winnipeg's Exchange District he uses this time to meet with a client for whose ultra modern home he's designing a movie screen sizes sculpture that will fasten to the wall. Carther was up all night finishing the drawings. Current works in progress fill his 20 ft high, 5000 square foot studio space, required for the scale of work he does. Carther is the Claes Oldenberg of glass . The Christo of crystal. When this three piece, 25-tonne Chronos Trilogy was unveiled in the foyer of a Hong Kong office tower last year, one of its components was recognized as the most massive freestanding carved glass sculpture in the world. It will not hold that record for long. A new piece of art in the Anchorage airport-featuring nine 26-foot-high towers will eclipse it when it is eventually finished by ...Warren Carther. Whence this crazy love of scale? Carther traces it back, in part to a kind of junior epiphany he had as an eight-year-old on a family car trip traveling west from the prairies toward the Continental Divide. Abruptly the flat land stopped and the Rockies reared up and "it was like seeing God." The force of that feeling stayed with him. He would eventually aim to reproduce it. Adequately capturing, say, the vastness of the Arctic seems to demand a Brobdingnagian canvas; but Carther says, "some of the themes I choose to speak about [time, harmony, the interplay of ying and yang] are fairly large as well." If that early cross country voyage sparked the first eureka moment in Carthers life, the second came some 15 years later.

It was 1974, and Carther and his then girl-friend were touring through an art gallery, the exhibits left Carther unmoved. But something unexpected seized his attention. The door to the boardroom had been left open. Inside, running the whole length of the table, was a lamp: one long steel bar bearing glass globes. It was actually a fairly hideous lamp (this was the 70's), but it catalyzed an elaborate fantasy. "I saw this thing," Carther remembers, "and I said, "My god, I want to go to Europe , and apprentice myself to a glass factory and learn to blow glass spheres three feet in diameter filled with neon and smoke." He decided in that in that instant that he would be "the first glass artist in the contemporary world." This was of course mad folly. A fraternity of glass artists (albeit a fairly small one) already existed. In fact, there were schools where you could learn the craft and the theory and be well on your way to a unique career, pushing creative boundaries, dabbling in the alchemy of bent light. Carther went for it. He studied briefly in New York before Pitching up at Oakland's prestigious California Collage of Arts and Crafts (CCAC), where he did indeed become a glass blower. Under the gaze of the glass program's founder Marvin Lipofsky, he began to indulge his jones for scale. During this time Carther began to think about glass differently , as an architectural element. Then one day, in 1977 as Carther and Lipofsky drove home from a concert, Carther turned to the master and said, apropos of nothing but anticipating everything , "Marvin, I want to build giant walls of glass."

The Chronos Trilogy is a year old now, but it still generates a buzz within the international art community. Other glass artists who have seen it, or even pictures of it, sometimes call up Carther and verbally doff their caps to the triptych that tells the story of Hong Kong past present and future.

Two years in the making and unveiled to great fanfare, Chronos marks Carther's most striking use of one of his favorite materials: dichroic glass. Uniquely, dichroic glass absorbs one color spectrum and transmits another . The color on top of it morph into their complements (green into red, yellow into blue) as the light shifts, or the viewers perspective changes. Laminated between a base layer of glass and a carved layer, like meat in a sandwich, it picks up and sends back with interest every subtlety of Carthers carving.

In approach of time (the third part of Chronos), the effect is so striking that the sculpture looks completely different by day and by night. Daylight brings the whole piece to life with rich, translucent color. After sundown, the interior halogen light turns it opaque. And the dichroic colors shift from a pinkish hue to reflecting an electric blue. Carther's collection of big ticket projects is growing, and any of a half dozen of them could lead to a magazine article like this one.

There are the sculptures in the Air Canada VIP lounge in Winnipeg, Ottawa and Paris. The160 foot long glass wall in the Yellowknife legislative assembly. The monumental piece in the Winnipeg office of The Investors Group. And what some think is the most resonant work: the glass sculpture in the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, based on the principles of ikebana. But- not just because he beat out both Dale Chihuly and the British sculptor Lynn Russell Chadwick to land it-Chronos remains his greatest source of pride. "I feel there's something very special about that piece, " he says. "I had a great site and a great budget, I just flew with it." Chronos does seem to have had providence on its side. After coming up with the design but before making the pitch to the judging committee Carther consulted a Hong Kong feng shi expert to make sure his work wasn't going to be perceived as an energy sink. "I was concerned that some of my pieces were to angular, " he recalls. Luckily, "the angles were in the right direction. " And the career of the Canadian Artist resumed its graceful trajectory.

Bruce Grierson