Glass Artist Creates Molten Modern

It’s not surprising perhaps that one of California’s most innovative glass artists grew up in a modern house of glass. Oakland artist David Ruth, profiled in the Fall 2014 issue of CA-Modern magazine, blends ultra-modern with a touch of Arts & Crafts for a unique look.

Ruth, who began his career in the early 1970s, has emerged as an artist with a difference. “He has a unique method of casting (glass), putting 3-D imagery into big slabs of glass, and then polishing them out,” says David Wagner, a longtime glass artist and a consultant to glass artists nationwide and in Canada.

The result is colorful, brain-boggling imagery of what seem like undersea or astral worlds within massive blocks of glass.

Ruth began by creating stained glass panels in a kind of revival of an Arts & Crafts aesthetic, he says.

“We weren’t doing anything that was new, except doing it again,” he says of himself and his compatriots.”

But, he says, “The aesthetic had changed from the last crafts revival in the early 20th Century.” Modernism has intervened. Ruth knew modernism, having grown up in first one, then a second International Style homes designed by Berkeley architect Donald Olsen for his parents.

“What a lot of us were interested in was taking glass and putting it into that modern context. I was obviously highly interested in mid-century modernism. I thought the glass offered the possibility of making glass pieces that expressed some of that heroism and character and expression."

“I was very sensitive to glass from an early age. Don Olsen, I have to say, is one of the biggest influences on my vision because he created these spaces. In some way my work is a reaction to that because he was so minimal and clean and I was growing up in these hippie years where we were try to psychedelicize out vision and have these things that are more fractured and colorful. But actually it turned out to be a great contrast to the modern architecture.”

For a sneak peek in PDF of the David Ruth profile, 'Ice and Fire,' from the new fall '14 CA-Modern, click on the attachment link at the bottom of this page. A PDF of the story will quickly fill your screen.

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