Brits can make anything sound like a breeze. When glass artist Marc Tickle, brought up near London and based locally for nine years, demonstrates the deft but scrupulous mirror-trimming that shapes his award-winning kaleidoscopes and shadow boxes, he might be telling a kindergartener how to cut snowflakes out of a piece of paper.
As though it were easy. A few snips, then magic.
Tickle’s West Asheville studio faces southeast inside a tidy brick two-story home he shares with his fiancée, a preschool teacher and fellow swing dancer. Unlike others who toil in his medium, he doesn’t need a lot of noisy tools to accomplish art. His secret involves a type of front-surface mirror glass that under-reflects an image and thus achieves, ironically and trickily, a more spectacular optical illusion.
“Just like that,” says Tickle in his soft-spoken way, carving out a precise semi-circle from the edge of two of the special mirrors. Folded, tesseract-like, the flat disc will flourish at predetermined angles to form what looks like a floating sphere. “It’s really quite simple.”
But what’s invested in these glass pieces — from the glittering mandala scopes that are like royal versions of the classic toy to Tickle’s latest ventures in faux-3D sculpture featuring miniature Japanese lanterns and dragonflies — is hardly child’s play. Geometry plays a crucial role. Measurements must be spot-on. And before discovering front-surface mirrors, the artist worked and reworked laborious formulas, using up to five traditional mirrors to create visual displays. He reveals a small book of cramped figures to prove it.
“Some people can do random and make it look fabulous,” he remarks. “But it doesn’t work with what I do — too chaotic. If a kaleidoscopic image is not completely symmetrical, the eye goes straight to that [off-center] point.” He praises the organic harmony of natural objects that makes them especially compelling, mentioning the mathematical Fibonacci ratio that orders sunflowers, snail shells and the like.
“You might be drawn to a certain tree, for instance, and wonder, ‘Why am I so taken with this?’ It’s an almost unconscious appreciation of form, of structure, that resonates in all of us.”
Not that chance hasn’t played a hand in his career. Multi-decorated in member exhibitions of the Brewster Kaleidoscope Society, Tickle enjoyed a swift rise to success. He started out as a political cartoonist and says he’s always had an appreciation for design. In 1989, he began visiting his transplanted parents in Asheville; Marc’s father, trompe l’oeil artist Derick Tickle, meticulously recreated faded period interiors at the Biltmore Estate and went on to found the prestigious Decorative Restoration Program at A-B Tech. On one of these trips, Marc stumbled onto West Asheville institution A Touch of Glass and started creating stained-glass projects. One night, he was asked to proofread a book on kaleidoscope making when the real editor didn’t show up — and his life’s design fell into place.
“We were at the co-author’s house, and he had a gallery stacked with kaleidoscopes. I had never seen anything like them. What I was used to as a kid was suddenly completely new to me, and it was astonishing to go back and look at how he might possibly be doing it.
“The next day,” he says with typical understatement, “I got this bug to make my own.”
Soon enough, Tickle had completed his first batch of scopes and sold them all to a gallery back in London. Then another British gallery discovered him. Since moving to Asheville, he’s exhibited at Blue Spiral 1 and with the Southern Highland Craft Guild. Museums in Japan, among other global galleries, display his work. But a good deal of his sculpture is sold to his avid private collectors, who run the gamut from “scientists to teachers to doctors to authors. It’s actually quite surprising, the variety of people.”
He’s excited about an upcoming collaboration with his dad that will involve incorporating into his own shadow boxes the elder Tickle’s rubbings of engraved images depicting the knights and ladies of medieval England. (When he’s not teaching, Marc’s father works as the official heraldic court artist for London’s Middle Temple and The House of Lords.)
The sculptor also shows off a painting technique that’s lately captured his fancy. Using mica powder and clear varnish, he’s able to produce a full spectrum of color without ever mixing particular hues. It has to do with the luminescence of the mica, Tickle explains. The light it traps exists in various thicknesses that react with the varnish to manifest the rainbow array.
“It’s really quite simple,” he repeats. Well, perhaps. But Tickle also appreciates the tie to the region — mica sparkles rampantly in the Southern Appalachians.
“It’s a nice way,” he says, “to reflect the local environment.” Brilliant, actually.