Glass, that most quotidian feature of our manufactured environments, is a playful medium. It can stand by quietly to allow light to pass through unaltered, or it can transform that same light into washes and sparkles of color. Asheville glass artist Carl Powell, whose creations in stained glass can be found from Barcelona to Tokyo to Mexico City, produces these studies in light from the studio he’s inhabited for 16 years in the Grovewood complex of artists (next to Grovewood Gallery), drawing on more than four decades of experience manipulating the play of glass and light.
Studying drawing and painting at Georgia State University, “I was particularly drawn to Russian modernists like Wassily Kandinsky and their use of form and color,” says Powell. He was invited by a friend to visit a stained-glass studio — and there Powell met his medium of choice.
“The owners offered me a job on the spot,” he says. He learned all the basic techniques of stained-glass fabrication while helping the studio with its residential commissions. Powell moved on to painting and firing glass when he was sent to study with an old master of the genre in Fort Meyers, Florida — one who specialized in beveling glass (grinding and polishing) for greater light effects.
It was a new element that Powell added to his toolbox. And it became a key feature in his work, one he took to ever-higher levels, via complex faceted shapes.
Hanging in one of his studio windows is a square, multi-paned work with a delicate, gray, circular bevel inserted in the center, diffracting the soft light of an early mountain spring.
Powell’s career next sent him to Austin, Texas, where he set up his own studio and soon received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts Craftsman Fellowship for his innovative designs and techniques. He was commissioned by the director of the local art museum to make windows for her home.
His reputation continued to rise. Powell was included in the first Americans in Glass exhibit that toured the U.S. for three years.
By the early ’80s, Powell had moved to Denver as the artist-in-residence for a company that made grinding and polishing equipment for glass artists. During this time, he was invited to give a slide lecture at the international Glass Art Conference in Toronto.
It was there that he met renowned glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, who invited him to teach at the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, the largest glass school in the world. At Pilchuck, Powell’s peers included glass artists from the Czech Republic, with its centuries-old tradition of glassmaking. “I was starting to get a little bored with traditional techniques until I met the late Stanislav Libensky, who was, at the time, considered by many to be the best glass artist in Europe,” he says.
One of Powell’s new sculptural pieces in this mode was chosen to be in the Corning Museum’s New Glass Review. Sitting on a bench in Powell’s Grovewood studio is an example of what’s become the hallmark of his work — a stack of plate-glass rectangles compressed in a vise and bonded with an archival adhesive. Powell has etched on them the mysterious glyphs that appear in many of these laminated geometric pieces.
“I’ve traveled a lot,” muses Powell, who moved to Asheville to be closer to family in his native Georgia. “I have always been fascinated by petroglyphs and hieroglyphics,” he goes on. When the adhesive sets, the glass stack forms an element of a larger work, the etched figures appearing to float inside the form.
Some of Powell’s glass pieces are embraced in concrete and steel pedestals, on which he incises naturally derived shapes. Others are more modest in size and sit, totem-like, on shelf or desk. Each piece undergoes at least four stages of grinding and polishing to maximize its refractive qualities.
Scattered on one of Powell’s worktables are drawings in colored pencil for one of the many private commissions he undertakes — an explosion of stained-glass forms surrounding the entryway of a recently built Asheville home.
“I always create my own designs and present the client with a color drawing for approval before starting the process,” he explains. His largest commissioned public piece to date, 24’-by-10’, was made for a performing-arts center in Anchorage, Alaska, and consumed eight months before it was completed.
Other public commissions include a striking, angular stained glass piece done for the University of Florida. Suspended in a clear glass grid high above an entry door, it is a fine example of light’s multiple personalities. Ordinary light falls through the frame, but from the centerpiece, the play of color dazzles.
Visit carlpowellglass.com, Grovewood.com