Review
World renowned artist Paul Stankard, who pioneered modern flameworking techniques in glass art, insightfully reflects upon his life-long personal challenges with dyslexia and how he overcame these obstacles in his continuing pursuit of knowledge. As one of the eminent glass artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, his is a story that inspires, educates, and encourages us all. He has earned our deepest admiration. --Dr. Anne Steele, President, Muskingum College, New Concord, OH
America's premier lampworker has written a richly detailed emotional reminiscence of his search to find a meaningful life. This book gives the reader a glimpse into his life and how through extraordinary perseverance he eventually transformed the lampworker's torch from its historic tradition into a compelling tool for contemporary glass artists. --Henry Halam, Kent State University, Kent, OH
In this honest and intimate autobiography, Paul Stankard describes his life and his work in unabashed detail. Guided by his faith and supported by his loving wife and family, he has led an ideal life, not so much out of good fortune, but out of living and working in goodness. Here is a man who has gotten it right, and who has taken the time to share it with us in the very medium that is most difficult for him. We are all the richer for it. --Robert Mickelsen, Glass Artist, Melbourne, FL
Product Description
No Green Berries or Leaves is a collection of autobiographical essays by Paul J. Stankard, recognized widely as one of the world s master glass artists. Stankard is particularly renowned and respected for his flameworked floral motifs expressed in crystal paperweights, rectangular columns, and orbs.
Paul was trained in scientific glassblowing and worked in industrial scientific glass during most of the 1960s. Challenged by an inner sense of creativity and the need to establish his creative independence, he started making paperweights in the early 1970s. Attracted to the emerging studio glass movement, recognized as a maker of fine paperweights, and driven by an intense and incessant pursuit of excellence, Paul was by the 1980s recognized as a highly accomplished glass artist, a member of the pioneering generation of glass artists in America. As the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of his art matured, and as he continued to develop new techniques for expressing his art, he also assumed more prominent influence in the development of educational programs and institutions that celebrated and expanded art in glass. Throughout his life, Paul also wrestled with, and learned how to succeed in spite of, a learning disability dyslexia.
No Green Berries or Leaves presents the author s record of his life as a struggling, then highly successful, artist; reveals insights into the challenges he faced as a dyslexic and how he came to understand, then circumvent, his disability; and records his perspectives on the history of the studio glass movement in America as he witnessed and experienced it during the past fifty years. This book will be of value to readers interested in the life of a major American artist and the history of the glass art movement in America, as well as to those looking for an inspirational story of how, in one man, the human spirit faced, addressed, and outwitted a learning disability and climbed the steep road to success to become a master artist in glass.
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