In New Jersey: Capturing Nature in Glass

By David Brand

The colored glass dances in the flame. It loops and curls as tweezers cajole the formless blob into shape, flattening its surface and teasing out its apex, until, as if the flame has magical properties, a small, delicately structured leaf emerges. More colored glass is added to the gas jet, layer upon layer of opaque, translucent and transparent browns, yellows, oranges and reds, and one by one petals, stamens and stems bloom into being. Paul Stankard leans back from the workbench at his home in Mantua, N.J., and his broad, open face creases into a smile. "You know what I do for a living?" he asks. "I take $25 worth of material, make love to it for a few hours and then sell it for $1,000."

Stankard, 44, is an artist in glass. His nimble fingers can fashion fragile slivers into wild flowers with a captivating attention to detail; leaves have been munched by insects; petals show the wilt of age; and beneath the plant a tangle of roots seeks nourishment from the earth. True, they are not exact replicas of woodland plants, but neither are they prettified curios. Each spiderwort, evening primrose or wood lily is a stylized representation of growth and decay. The complexity of the design, Stankard says, must not be obvious. "It must reveal itself."

In 15 years he has gone from struggling craftsman to an artist whose crystal-encased wild flowers are in demand by collectors around the world and represented in museums from the Smithsonian Institution to London's Victoria and Albert. Dwight P. Lanmon, director of the Corning Museum of Glass, which also collects his work, sees in Stankard's flowers a spontaneity and freshness that "capture the quality of living plants."

That assessment is light-years from 1970, when, Stankard recalls, a local antiques dealer bought his first glass-flower paperweights for $10. Then he was in the midst of "figuring out the secrets of how to do this -- at first I didn't have the vaguest idea. But as I met each new challenge, it became a narcotic." The effort has paid off handsomely: recently, at Manhattan's prestigious Heller Gallery, collectors were snapping up his crystal sculptures for as much as $7,500.

Stankard, a gregarious man, has his Irish ancestors' love of talking, particularly about his success in life, which he views with incredulity. Is it possible, he asks, that a former glassblower can find himself feted by gallery owners and collectors? "I keep thinking I will wake up and it will all be over," he says. "I worry that people will say, 'O.K., you've been goofing off long enough. Go get a job.' "

In truth, though, sculpting in glass is exacting, sensitive work. By 6 a.m. Stankard is in his studio, twirling thin rods of colored glass over the gas- oxygen burner, similar to a large welding torch. The centuries-old process is lampworking, so named because the glass was once worked over an oil lamp. "Lampworking was trivialized as a street craft and dismissed as an art form," says Stankard. "I think I've brought it far enough along that in a hundred years people will say, 'Holy smoke, how did he do that?' " As if to puncture such pretensions, he grins and says, "Besides, I've brought up five kids on this."

Technical mastery of anything seemed unlikely when Stankard was a youngster. "I was a dreamer. My mother wanted me to be a dentist, but I flunked all my grades." His father, who was a chemist, suggested scientific glassblowing; that appealed to the young Stankard, and he enrolled in a technical school. After graduating he spent a decade working in industry, making glass instruments for laboratories. But the job became increasingly repetitive, and "I would entertain myself by making glass animals and flowers. Then I began experimenting with making paperweights."

In 1971 he took his paperweights to a crafts show in Atlantic City. There he met Gallery Owner Reese Palley. "The minute I saw his work," says Palley, "I knew that this was the product of a person with an innate understanding of nature." Palley urged Stankard to give up his job and concentrate on fashioning flowers. He would pay him $250 a week to start; in return he would have first refusal on Stankard's work. "What should I do?" Stankard asked his wife Pat. Her reply: Wait for two weeks after the birth of their fourth child. Then do it. The association was to last five years, and Palley was a demanding master: Stankard smashed his first week's production with a hammer because Palley told him it was not good enough.

Stankard could barely afford to destroy his work because he was desperately short of crystal. In 1975 he solved the problem by ordering $15,000 worth of glass from a Pennsylvania optical glass company. He was earning only $7,000 a year at the time, and he had no savings. To pay the bill, the Stankards renegotiated the mortgage on their house.

Relieved of this worry, Stankard began producing a profusion of wild-flower paperweights: painted Trillium, black-eyed Susan, loosestrife, lady's slipper and prickly pear cactus. Sometimes they were shown in their entire life cycle: bud, blossom and seedpod on a single stem. Sometimes their root systems were shown beneath the earth on the underside of the crystal globe. Even as a child, he had a passion for wild flowers. Now, as a working artist, he improved his knowledge of their shape and form by studying flowers he found growing behind his house or on long walks in New Jersey's wild and beautiful Pine Barrens. The idea, he says, is "to submerge myself in nature, so that the more familiar I become with flowers, the more that understanding will come through in my work."

The flowers' appeal, though, was restricted to paperweight collectors; not a world of the arts, but more one of solid, practical investment, rather like that of collecting Christmas plates. Eight years ago, Stankard began encasing his flowers in a crystal block about six inches high, three inches wide. As this new form evolved, he began laminating the blocks with translucent dark green glass on three sides, giving the impression that the plants and their roots are suspended in space, released from their glass prison. The form, which Stankard calls a cloistered botanical, brought his work to the attention of collectors of contemporary glass. "He has broken away from the traditional paperweight style, and is now accepted as a very serious artist around the world," says Douglas Heller, director of the Heller Gallery.

Something ethereal, even mystical, is going on inside these glass blocks. The roots are surrounded by tiny earth-brown figures, climbing the tendrils, kneeling, interacting, always busy, like a troupe of modernist dancers. The idea for what Stankard calls his "root people" came from medieval woodcuts showing nymphs and fairies emerging from flowers. "Some people tell me that something erotic is going on, but I like to think of the root people as spirits nurturing the plant."

The making of a Stankard sculpture is fraught with such risk that 30% fail. The above- and below-ground sections of the flower -- which have taken one to three days to lampwork -- are separately encased in crystal. After the halves of the sculpture have been worked into shape, they are fused together, a finely calibrated procedure that can mean failure if the alignment is even slightly off. The sculpture is put in a 960 degrees F oven for 30 hours to anneal, or temper, the glass. After all this, a piece can emerge cracked from the oven. Thermal shock is often the explanation, but sometimes the cause is a mystery. Recently Stankard attempted to produce a series of five crown imperials, a variety of lily; only two survived, and a week of work was wasted.

"I think my best work is yet to come," he says, strolling through the six acres of woodland he bought four years ago, which provides the inspiration for many of his pieces. Every petal, every stamen continues to be a challenge. For four years he has been trying to interpret mountain laurel blossoms in glass, but he is still unable to reach the perfection he demands. "One day," he says with a shrug, "I'll get it."