carving moments of natural beauty…

Each piece of Adam Waimon’s glass art has a life of its own. “I create a relationship with my work, these pieces - believe it or not - travel with me. They will come from the studio with me to my home, so they can sit on my table, so I can look at them and really connect with them.” Waimon told us in our recent Studio Focus interview “It just allows me to spend more time with them. And seeing them in different settings and in different lights, that allows me to really find the right balance of the engraving and how I want to carve it.”

Adam Waimon is a young glass artist living and working in Rhode Island. Inspired by nature and often the majesty of the Rhode Island coastline, Waimon creates abstract pieces that recreate the fleeting moments of beauty he finds in nature through flowing shapes of color and texture.

Waimon can be found in his studio space blowing glass with an assistant (or more recently solo due to COVID-19 circumstances) about once a week and spending most of the remainder of his time in the engraving studio painstakingly working on the surface of a piece. Going into the first stage of his process, the glass blowing, with an abstract and broad idea in mind and a few simple and loose sketches, he begins to create his ongoing dialogue with each glass piece.

“I have a good idea of what I want the final work to look like” he tells us “but the glassblowing portion of the process….it is so alive. There is so much movement that occurs and you have to adapt through the process.” Once a work is begun Waimon sits with it in a clean white studio space to sketch on it and study its shape before beginning his engraving process. Each work is carved uniquely to relate back to a balance within its own individual form. “That is really where a majority of the time is spent; I am taking lots of time removing the surface and trying to get a lot of depth into the surface of the piece”. Often cutting as much as half an inch of a silica soda lime glass away (which is much harder than leaded glass, and as a result much more time consuming and difficult to carve into). “There is always going to be some variation in the design” he tells us of his carving process “and I am open to that variation in the process”.

“Instead of trying to push it into what I want it to be” He goes on to explain the dialogue he has with each work,  “I try to work with the piece and learn how to make those uncertainties in the process work to my advantage. I think that is really coming through in my most recent work at Schantz Galleries. Though they are very much a series of work and cohesive, they are all a bit different. That comes from the variations of what comes in the process. And it can be as simple as using a certain color with a different working property, so I try to use those uncertainties to my advantage and see what comes of it.”

In his pieces currently on display at Schantz Galleries Waimon is moving into a new stage of his work, the use of color. “I always tried to use a minimal amount of color because I was always studying the glass blowing process and focusing on the form. And to do that I decided it would be best to keep my color palette very simple. As I have improved, and my artistic practice has become stronger I found it was time for me to start adding color” he told us. “You have to be an artist and a technician” he went on to say of the new challenges adding colored glass has presented to his work. There is an emotional charge to this new layer of dialogue presented in Waimon’s pieces on display at the gallery. The glowing colors and depth and emotion behind the textured surface that has been sandblasted then fire polished to mimic in both mood and visual presence of the shimmering glossy yet rigidly sharp surface of waves rippling over the ocean.

This is showcased exquisitely in Waimon’s piece Golden Hour, 2020 where the cascades of ocean blues and sunset orange dance together perfectly to capture the feeling of that moment where we all look our camera ready best and feel the soft glow of the beauty held in our own dialogue with nature. His other works in the gallery swirl with magnificent sea blues a viewer could get as easily lost in as an ocean. While color may be a newer theme in Waimon’s work, it is something he has been studying his whole life.

Born in Connecticut to a family of artists, few people have spent as much time in an art studio as Adam Waimon. His mother is a painter and printmaker, his father a ceramicist, and his grandmother a painter and all of them exposed him to art and creativity from an early age. Prints and paintings by Waimon’s mother surround him at home giving him daily inspiration in color use. In fact, his family's artistic eye for color goes back many generations “my great grandfather worked at a hardware store in Harlem in the 1930’s that sold only a few paint colors but he would mix custom colors for customers before this was a common thing. Our family’s fascination with color spans nearly a century.” He told us. And it was on a family trip to Italy just before he entered high school that he found his love for glass. On this trip Waimon made his first visit to the island of Murano, known internationally for its time-honored traditions of glassmaking, and was instantly mesmerized with the malleability of the molten medium.

Some of Adam’s photos illustrate his source of inspiration, derived from his time spent at the edge of the land and water where they meet the sky.

In his own work Waimon draws stylistic inspiration from his mother's use of atmospheric coloring, his grandmother's abstracted depictions, and his father's use of 3D sculptural forms to create a style that is his own culmination of their influences to depict moments in nature that spark interest and inspire him. “I am interested in how land, water, and the atmosphere interact” seeking to depict a balance in each of his works that he finds in this natural relationship. Most often finding strong inspiration on the coastline of Rhode Island. Waimon finds inspiration in the colors and textures created by these fleeting moments of natural beauty that wash in and out with the ocean tides.

It was also Waimon’s family that introduced him to Schantz Galleries. Years ago, his family took a then young Waimon to visit the gallery on day trips to the Berkshires. Little did he know one day he would find his way back to the gallery as an adult, this time to showcase his own work.

Katy Holt for Schantz Galleries

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AVAILABLE WORKS BY ADAM WAIMON