Chihuly Gardens

It was a rainy Seattle night in March this year, when we visited the Dale Chihuly Gardens, for a dinner if you please.

We were greeted with a glass of champagne, and everything was all posh and beautiful, except that I was in hiking shoes, trousers and a jacket more suited for the great outdoors rather than some posh western do!

You enter the exhibit through a long corridor called the Glasshouse, which is a long corridor, all lit up, with the ceiling made of glass above which is an assorted collection of Chihuly work.  (To my mind, it looked like a glass loft with all the extra pieces of glass sculptures,  Rather clever!)

If you click on the pictures, you will see them in full detail and resolution.

The work on the glass was exquisite, and there were different "series".  This was part of the Basket series (if I remember right), and quite my favourite for elegance subtlety and something I would love to see everyday.  The light  glinted off these containers within containers quite magically.

The lighting was a challenge to my iPhone and my digital camera.

I would love to create Ikebana in these.

The Octopus from the Sealife Room.  Hmm.  The whole room was filled with
kind of grotesque and strongly coloured installations, inspired by sea life
 and the Puget Sound, the literature said.

The Sealife tower in the Sealife Room.  

Ikebana and the Float Boats were a set of two "boats", one was filled with Chihuly's interpretation of Ikebana elements, and the other with Niijima Floats.

The series is attributed to his time In Finland (1995), when he randomly threw glass into the river to see how they would interact with the water.  Local teenage kids picked these up and filled their rowboats with them.  Little did they realise that years later, a woman from india would be looking at the resulting inspiration with a non plussed air.

This is the Ikebana boat with the long lines that look like stems

These were inspired by "the artist's trip to the Japanese island of Niijima and by childhood memories of discovering
Japanese fishing net floats along the beach of Puget Sound".

...Another perspective...

The Venetian glass makers were a source of instruction and inspiration through Chihuly's artistic evolution.  "Chihuly over Venice" was a set of Chandeliers he installed across that city.  Chandeliers

The Chandelier room

The Macchia series - a technique of using an in-between cloudy layer is how I understood it.  the effect was stunning, with the colours so different, on the inner and outer surfaces.

Each piece had a different feel to it, and I loved this series, which looked like flower heads to me.

Ppppies, he could have called them?

And we dined under this!  Dramatic!  I imagine that in the day with a blue sky, the effect would be quite different.

The Garden of Glass - Mille Fiori - inspired by memories of his mother's garden.

Each of the elements in the "garden" were unique.

I wandered out in the drizzle to try and catch a glimpse of the outdoor sculptures.  The Needle towered overhead.

The garden has a large collection of shrubs, trees and plants, but I was unable to make out one from the other, as the lighting was on the glass sculptures, sending the live garden into the shadows.

This piece has travelled widely as part of Chihuly's exhibitions here and there.

The sheer ambition and size of the "sculptures" and this use of glass as architectural art expression was unique to me.

A day visit would probably be very different from a night one, especially the gardens on the outside, which, given the rain we didn't see much of.

As I wandered through, I mused that at one end of the scale of display are the amazing Chola bronzes in the not-so-amazing Bronze Gallery at Chennai, and at the other end was this.  Maximum effect of lighting, space, and display style.

It was cold (by Madras standards) and wet as we left the Gardens and headed back to our hotel.  It was like emerging from an alien world, a science fiction movie, back into the real world with soft colours and textures and the real patter of rain and the wind on my face.

Art with shock and awe, thats how I would describe the Chihuly glass installations.

Uber zindabad I thought as a cab pulled up at the kerb for us, and no it was not an Indian driver but a Chinese!