THE ARTISTS

Bertil Vallien
Called the grand master of sandcasting, Bertil Vallien weaves mythical imagery and storytelling into his sculpture series of boats, maps and heads that are valued by collectors the world over, and his ships have become a part of modern glass history. The New York Times admits “there are always haunting mysteries to the work of this Swedish artist.” Vallien continues to design glass for Orrefors and Kosta Boda, with which he has been affiliated since 1963.

“Bertil Vallien is without doubt one of the world’s leading glass artists. With his sandcast sculptures, he stretches the functional bounds of glass into the realm of fine arts. In creating his ships and other glass sculptures, he has developed a language of symbol and implication relentlessly focused on the basic themes of human life. The beholder meets the existential questions in these works, works which offer up their symbols as timeless fossils, sealed in crystalline glass that captures light and shuts it in. ‘Glass eats light,’ Vallien has said, a statement that flies in the face of our usual view of glass as a reflective surface. But he creates an inner spectrum in the massive glass.”
-- Gunnar Lindqvist

"The high spot of the process is the actual castings when the white-hot vitreous mass is scooped up by the iron ladles from within the fiery depths of the furnace to fill the molds. The slightest miscalculation can be fatal - the sizzling, smoldering mass is lithely hot.

The teamwork between the casters must be exact, meticulous. As the molds are filled, a rare sight is seen as the shapes and figures within the sculpture gradually emerge in glowing splendor, changing from brilliant white, to orange, then to cherry red.

Rather like when Professor Schileman opened the stone sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid - as they remove the heavy lid, a princess of great beauty is revealed, adorned with gold and clad in rich array. Then the air creeps in and, within minutes, the splendid figure has crumpled to a heap of dust before their eyes.

With glass it is not quite so drastic. A violent transformation does take place in the cooling-oven. When the sculpture is prised out and removed from the cooler, the red-hot boat has turned to everlasting ice. The tale the sculpture tells is captured for eternity in the glass, and only infernal fires can restore it to its original form.

I have often asked myself why I sculpt in glass, when clay and paint would be so much easier to handle. Glass is obstinate, with a will of its own. Some shapes are quite unthinkable. One is dependent on many helpers; it is expensive and time-consuming: the cooling process alone takes a month. It is a time of anxious waiting; a power-outage could destroy months of preparation.

Despite all this I persist. There is a kind of magic in glass, which has something to do with the light. To capture traces of past and memories of the future by way of the light.

For the material that I work with is an invisible one that devours light."

-Bertil Vallien

Ulrica Hydman-Vallien
One of Sweden’s best-known and most popular artists, Ulrica Hydman-Vallien’s unmistakable figures can be seen on Ericsson mobile phones, British Airway planes, and distinctive designs produced by Orrefors and Kosta Boda, among other places.

“Ulrica Hydman-Vallien is about the most ‘un-Swedish’ glass artist Sweden has seen … She does not in any way try to hide that her goal is to make best-sellers, which might seem normal to an American, but is definitely provocative to many people in Sweden. According to the Swedish design community, preachers of purity and minimalism, you are just not supposed to be like Ulrica Hydman-Vallien. Her colors are too bright, her hair is too red, her speak of mind too frank … She even admits that she loves being famous. Unforgivable!”
-- writer Annica Kvint

"Still in love.

After thirty years with the material glass, I am still in love with the process... new excitements and new disappointments, and always some unexpected moment in the hot or cold world. Always together with the craftsmen; they are my close partners. I am still the good combination of artist and designer. Today, like in the 1970s, I fill the shiny surface with my paintings and drawings, most of the time using black lines that are for me, very tempting to tell a story in my own style - easy to recognize.

In the 1980s, when I took the responsibility and understood the necessity of design for mass production, I saw the need of a series production for Kosta Boda, and I understood the need for success - the series Open Minds, Caramba (1985) and Tulipa (1990s) have become today's classics. That gave me a freedom of giving myself time for unique objects and in technique like kabale, engraving and graal, and the series of solid unique crystal blocks, my snakes and painted birdmen in gold.

Today I still feel fine about the mix of mass production and the freely made art-glass. And now, again, I work with freely sculptured small figures like Batwoman and Man and the phantom-women-man painted in distinct black and red - and some are seen in Rockford Art Museum.