GA: How does your process differ from that of making a bead on a mandrel?
DH: When someone makes a bead, they're wrapping the hot glass around the mandrel, and they're working toward the exterior surface. Even if there's imagery inside, they're putting transparent glass over it, so they can always see what they're working on. I'm putting everything inside the glass, so it can't be seen. I want the imagery to be a cross-section. I build from the center out beginning with a gather of hot glass on the end of a color rod, which I shape with a knife. For example, to make an eye, I shape an initial gather of glass into a thin cylinder, so when you look at the end, you see a circle. This is the pupil. I take a knife and make an indentation in the entire length of the cylinder into which I put a little bit of ivory glass, creating some catch-light in the pupil.

GA: Was the first piece you created with the cubes, "Into My Life There Came a Man Named George"?
DH: Yes. This piece represented a tremendous leap forward in my work. Each of the portraits I do is based on the face of a real person or a combination of people, and as part of my creative process I develop an extensive history for each face that I'm working on - somewhat like an actor would develop a character study for a role he is to play. Since these portraits take an extraordinary amount of time to complete, I usually get carried away with various sordid little details - and I call what I'm doing "fictional portraiture". So each of my portrait subjects has an extensive pedigree, some parts real and some parts are merely figments of my imagination - but this is how I manage to get familiar with my subject.

The name in the title refers to a fellow glass artists and friend by the name of George Bucquet, though the image is not of George's face. George is a very gracious artist who offered me a great deal of support and encouragement at a time when I was ready to give up entirely on my work with mosaic glass portraiture. He convinced me that the work I was doing would ultimately be of historical importance, perhaps not in my lifetime, but someday. And that it was a pursuit worthy of the time and energy I was devoting to it. Because of him, I continued, and when I finally managed to complete this piece I decided to include his name in the title as a reference to the role he played in my decision to continue on in my work with portraiture in glass.

A fiction author shows you his characters through the use of words, and then it is up to the reader to visualize how they look. I am presenting the viewer with a visual image, and the viewer can come up with the word to describe the character he/she sees. I have my story (a very interesting one) - what is yours?

I followed up "George" with Lynn: Image/Self-Image", using as my subject a combination of the faces of my mother and my daughter. I limited myself to a palette of blues and black in order to set a mood and to develop a tone-poem in glass.

"Lynn: Image/Self-Image" (detail), Dinah Hulet, lampworked mosaic glass

(murrine) cane slice assemblage, 2000. PHOTO: Patty Hulet

 

GA: How has your use of color evolved over the years?
DH: In 1998, I was commissioned to do a portrait of an abstract-expressionist painter and decided to work with a more exciting, bold range of colors. Then when I was teaching at Penland two years ago, I was expressing my frustration with color to Mary Ann Zotto who was teaching the drawing class during that session, and she casually said "Look back at the Fauves" and so I did. The Fauves were a group of young avant-garde artists at the beginning of the last century that grouped themselves around the painter Henri Matisse. One of them, Andre Derain, said they "treated colors like sticks of dynamite, exploding them to produce light". A somewhat shocked critic called them Fauves, the French word meaning wild beasts, and these artists then adopted the name and used it proudly.

Color study of th Fauves (detail), Dinah Hulet, lampworked mosaic

glass (murrine) cane slice assemblage (1999). PHOTO: Patty Hulet

 

I am an autodidact (meaning self-taught) when it comes to both glass and art, and it is said that the problem with autodidacts is that they tend to have really crummy teachers. Well, I decided to use the Fauves as my teachers for a series of "etudes" focusing on the use of color. I was not interested in creating a likeness of these individual artists but instead I wanted to use the paintings themselves as my subjects -- to make portraits of the portraits -- I wanted to focus on their inappropriate use of color and the way that color was applied as a series well-defined shapes. In working on these four faces, I became interested in doing another smaller piece based on Henri Mattise's portrait of his wife, Madame Matisse. Here I constructed the portrait in a single cane within which I varied the colors of the background, so that as I stretched the cane to reduce the size of the image, the transition between these color variations was blended . It is interesting to see the changes that happen to the face with the use of different colors to the background.