Bertil Vallien

From Website: http://www.bertilvallien.com/bertil.htm

Bertil Vallien, one of the truly groundbreaking figures in Swedish glass art, was born in Stockholm in 1938. His father was a master painter and pastor of an independent church, his mother a housewife. Vallien was the second of seven children. The gifted young man soon tired of school and took a job as a decorator at PUB, one of the Swedish capital’s largest department stores. Shortly thereafter, though, he began studying art at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. He graduated at the top of his class in 1961 and was awarded a Royal Foundation grant.

The grant funded travels in the United States and Mexico between 1961 and 1963, giving him the freedom to achieve his first success as a ceramist in California. Together with his wife and fellow Konstfack graduate Ulrica Hydman-Vallien, he then returned to Sweden and moved to the glassmaking region of Småland. He had been recruited by the legendary glasshouse director Erik Rosén. Vallien immediately began to work in both glass and metal, and soon began to experiment with glass-casting.

Bertil Vallien is most renowned as the great master of sand-casting. His metres-long ships are prized by collectors, and his work is represented in the leading museums of the USA, Europe and Japan. “Early on I discovered that glass is a difficult material,” he says, “but one that offers a richness of possibility with its marriage of extremes: heat and cold, light and dark.” The idea of cast ship forms and the symbolic idiom he employs came to him in the late eighties. The ship is a perfect vessel for the expression of loneliness. It is evocative of femininity, of adventure, of catastrophe, a thin protective shell that demands the absolute respect of all aboard. It is a society in isolation, a self-contained world afloat on the sea.

“I have been lucky in life,” says Vallien. He spends much of his time thinking, much of it sketching, he says; rigorously self-critical, he discards most of what he produces. He considers his dual roles as a designer and a glass artist complementary. His art is a form of research. In the studio and on the blowing room floor, there is an ongoing dialogue between Vallien and the many skilled and loyal artisans who have shared in his voyage of discovery through the world of glass, now over thirty years long. Click here to view the Bertil Vallien Gallery.