Chandeliers don’t have to be stately or ponderous to be admired, believes Mark Peyton. They can be as full of color as they are of light — creations that evoke whimsy along with awe.
He also feels that chandeliers should throw light onto the personalities of their owners. If those owners are fun, their lighting could be fun as well. Peyton’s postmodern take on a traditional form hangs in many homes around the world. The American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan has honored his work with two exhibits.
And it all starts in his shop near Mars Hill, a building that was once a gas station, general store, tobacco barn and hog butchery (all at the same time). Each enameled brass chandelier that Peyton creates is a reflection of the colorful life he’s led.
His art began in the late 1950s and early ’60s. As a teenager living on the banks of Lake St. Clair in Michigan, Peyton would pick up and admire bits of smooth, tumbled glass before throwing them back into the icy water. His travels as a young man landed him in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., then Peru, until a national coup nudged him into Ecuador. He earned just enough money digging potatoes there to make it back to Miami. Arriving at the airport, he had 10 cents to his name.
Finding some bits of tumbled glass on the beach, he made a pendant for a friend and was pleasantly surprised when others wanted one too. Within three years, his jewelry was selling in 65 stores in the U.S. and the Caribbean.
By the mid ’90s, Peyton was tumbling his own glass from sheets he’d buy and cut. He started hanging pieces left over from his jewelry-making on a chandelier that someone had given him.
Nine months of casual stringing later, he had a piece of work.
“When I showed it at an art show, I sold it pretty fast,” says Peyton. “People were asking me, ‘Can you do an electric one?’”
So he learned wiring and built a Web site to advertise what he thought could be a new line of business. One couple in New York’s Hudson Valley bought seven chandeliers and was so taken by their vibrancy they hired Peyton to help them pick their wall colors. Online traffic brought him one of his most recent customers, a Greek photographer who’s building a house on the island of Patmos.
The photographer wanted the chandelier to fill a dome in his new bathroom. Despite its unusual placement in the house, the arch is similar to those found in Greece’s Byzantine churches. So Peyton strung the piece with crosses that he carved out of glass colored to reflect the blue of the sea and the white of the sun.
A slight, smiling man who radiates good cheer, Peyton works out of a perpetually disorganized shop crammed with tables and storage boxes, all covered and all full. Bins cradle prismatic crystals and metal stampings in the shapes of leaves, flowers and fleur de lis. Chains and tubing snake through columns and arms on nearly every surface. Drawers hold rainbows of opalescent glass, coral shells and large, polished palm seeds from Puerto Rico, where Peyton has a 32-acre organic farm.
But he rarely makes “spec” chandeliers anymore — most are commissioned. He asks clients what style, colors and size they’d like for the amount of money they want to spend. The more pieces fashioned into specific shapes — hearts, fish and stars are big in his constellation of icons — the more expensive the piece. Construction takes about two weeks. Prices range from $300 to $4,200.
Peyton also builds upon deconstructed chandeliers he discovers at flea markets, antique stores and in the trash. He finds his globes — a goblet or martini glass, say, that cradles the light bulb — at yard sales, department stores and in boxes by the curb. Crystals that once hung on a vintage fixture might pick up extra flash from strips of old roofing tin.
The artist is delighted with one of his latest design twists — beer bottles. He cuts them in half horizontally, grinds away the sharpness and sandblasts them to add depth. He gold-leafs the lip, then slides the resulting cones over the bulbs. Tucked inside the chandelier, the hoods add subtle casts of color. Red Stripe and Guinness Stout bottles are his current favorites. Club soda and Mexican beer bottles have also worked themselves into recent creations.
“These are common items that you see every single day, and all of a sudden you see them differently,” he says. Those moments are energizing, zapping him with new bursts of creativity. “It’s like I get to start all over again. That’s refreshing.”
Mark Peyton’s chandeliers are available at Porter & Prince in Biltmore Village and atbeachglassdesign.com/chandeliers