… counting one’s blessings

There is an exuberance to Martin Blank that simply cannot be contained, even by a pandemic that has brought us all personal and professional challenges. His positivity is magnetic. His enthusiasm is contagious. He has an insatiable curiosity about the world around him that inspires him to investigate things ranging from the natural world to Euclidean geometry. If you are looking for interesting conversation, he is a sure thing. He also has an incredibly balanced outlook on life, taking the good in stride with the bad and accepting the peaks and valleys of life and art with meditative grace.

Historically, Blank has been a man on the go. For years, he has traveled every two to three months installing his stunning glass sculptures. He loves to travel with his wife Marilyn (they live in Seattle) and two grown sons Isaac and Torin (who reside in New York). Four years ago, the family started a tradition of meeting for two-weeks each Christmas somewhere in the world. The first year it was Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. The next year they went to Italy, celebrating the parents’ 30th anniversary and spending Christmas Eve in Venice. The third year, they visited Thailand where Marilyn lived as a teenager. In 2020, with Covid travel restrictions in place they convened on Orcas Island, Washington where they swam in the frigid winter ocean, cooked meals together, did yoga, took drives, and read books. For Blank, this time with his family was a real gift. He says, it is not enough to count your blessings, you need to find the time and the place to count them.

Blank is a man who keeps things organized and likes to have a plan, but as a glass artist he is no stranger to sitting with uncertainty. He is incredibly social, so narrowing his community during the precarious months of the pandemic felt unnatural. He is keenly aware that his art is not made in a vacuum and grateful to have worked with so many wonderful people over the years, especially a man he calls “the amazing Jon Harvey.” He did have to lay off two employees and only blew glass a few times last year, but he considers himself lucky that his work was not significantly altered by Covid. He continued to work in his 3000 square-foot studio, subletting parts of it to an architect who played by the mask-wearing, social-distancing rules that kept everyone safe and productive. He learned a new pattern and felt at peace with the notion that the intensity of life comes and goes in waves.

Outside of work, he braved the cold and adopted a daily swimming routine at an outdoor pool that opened year-round during the pandemic. He took a lot of walks and found the regular athletic practice very grounding. He has always been an avid reader, a consumer of books, and the pandemic gave him even more time to devote to this passion. He loves science fiction and fantasy, but also physics and chemistry, history, world religions, Gertrude Stein, and the occasional Stephen King. The insightful romantic poet Walt Whitman is a bit of a hero. And during the pandemic he spent hours of quality time with his protective four-year old Rhodesian Ridgeback, Finn, who himself spent a lot of hours asleep on a cot in Blank’s office.

Professionally, the years leading up to Covid have been extraordinary for Blank. His breathtaking installation Repose in Amber (one of the largest hot-sculpted landscapes in the world) was installed at the Ft. Wayne Museum of Art, his spectacular Current was installed in the lobby of the Tacoma Art Museum, and his evocative outdoor Steam Portrait was installed at 99 Church Street, just steps away from the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York. During the quiet days of the pandemic, he worked on arranging the pieces for a new commission for the Imagine Museum in St. Petersburg, its large-scale forcing him to problem solve and push boundaries. The museum director called upon Blank to create a abstract landscape that referenced Buddha, the Virgin Mary, and Ghandi, as well as more universal figurative forms, all to represent the connection between man, nature, and spirituality and bring the viewer a sense of peace and well-being. The finished sculpture, entitled If a River Could Tell a Story, cascades down a staggering staircase of steel slabs, thousands of pounds of glass floating weightlessly on four legs.

Blank has been fascinated with the figures since he was 13 and his mom signed him up for an art class at the MFA in Boston. He was frustrated in school by learning disabilities and hampered in sports by poor stereoscopic vision in one eye. But he loved to draw and was especially beguiled by the Greek and Roman statues in the museum and how they epitomized beauty. He still paints and draws to this day, talking about the eye-mind-hand connection it engenders. When he is really in the moment, when he lets go of judgement and intellectualization and just purely responds to what he sees, he can let go even of the mind and create a direct line between his eye and his hand. It is a very pure experience with the material. He went to RISD, started blowing glass with Dale Chihuly and Lino Tagliapietra, and before long realized he had a real gift for sculpting glass.

Glass is the only material that is worked between the phases of matter—liquid and solid—and through his years of working with it Blank knows that glass is a true chameleon. Because there are so many ways it can be used, he says, the glass artist needs to focus on his intent, on what it is he wants to use the material to say. Blank’s figurative work is about looking at the way things unfold, about slowing down and taking in the sublime beauty of simple things, about putting objects together in sympathetic space so that there is tension between the material and the void. He cautions to never copy nature because you will always lose. Instead, he is inspired by the human form, not in the sense that he endeavors to produce perfectly formed, anatomically correct, and realistic bodies, but in the expressionistic sense where the viewer perceives the figurative structure and experiences the narrative of the human body and its relationship to its environment. He creates work you can walk around, with multiple points of entry and interesting optical stories to pursue.

Blank’s latest exploration of form can be seen in his series Deconstructed Blue. Blank says you must be courageous to be an artist, you must be comfortable with unpredictability and willing to make something that you are not proud of and never want to share. It is through this process of questioning and failure that the artist evolves. When Blank thought about where to take his figures next, it took a lot of courage to take what he was familiar with, break it down, and emerge with something truly beautiful. He calls it a “leap of faith … to cut up the form and ruin it so that maybe, it could become something more.” He was inspired by Alberto Giacometti, the 20th century Swiss sculptor known for his tall and slender bronze figures, to take away as much of the material as possible so that the viewer could just barely see the sculpture as a figure.

For this work, Blank focused much of his attention on color, using what he calls cloisonnéd blue in reference to the ancient Chinese technique for decorating metal objects. Carefully and deliberately, Blank applies silver leaf to the glass at certain times throughout the blowing process then quenches the glass in water to capitalize on a chemical reaction between the glass and the silver. When done right, it reads as mother of pearl when it reflects the light. The layers of glass and silver leaf are then cut in planes and sawed at angles, each in accordance with the cut before so that the many gathers are visible in the final sculpture, exposed like rings on a tree. The deconstructed torso forms have a geologic quality, crystalline bodies that bounce light throughout strata of luminous glass.

Martin Blank’s glass art vibrates with a life-giving force, an aspect that reflects the man himself. Blank says great art should be like an incredible piece of music, its tone should touch you, its waves should resonate within you, and merely through your senses you should be able to perceive what the artist is trying to communicate. For Blank, the message is one of wonderment and enthusiasm, of reflecting on the natural world and engaging in an immersive experience. Blank’s glass is done with incredible thoughtfulness and intellectual rigor, inseparable from his ceaseless curiosity and constant absorption of new information. But it is also done with total spontaneity, joy, and lack of inhibition, all of which is palpable to the viewer.

Available work by Martin Blank

About the artist

Whether it is a collection of flower blossoms, a monumental abstract installation, or a figurative sculpture, Martin Blank’s hot sculpted glass is made with a combination of technical exactitude and creative exuberance.  His working relationship with glass is an intimate one, as he wears heat protective clothing, gets very close, and employs his entire body while molding the molten material.  Intuitive and deliberate, he is nonetheless open to enhancing his visual vocabulary with the happy accidents of glasswork.