Looking past the glass: Chihuly Drawings on display at Wichita Art Museum

When art patrons hear the name Dale Chihuly, drawings aren’t what come to mind.

The 74-year-old artist has developed a reputation as perhaps the best-known glass artist in the world, with his works compared to full-scale sculpture.

And although the Wichita Art Museum has two Chihuly commissions in its collection – “Confetti Chandelier” in the Great Hall and “Persian Seaform Ceiling” at its entrance – it’s also featuring a different perspective of the artist with a display of his drawings.

“As an artist he started in interior design and worked his way over time to glass,” said museum director Patricia McDonnell. “Drawing is a constant that has been with him longer than even the medium for which he found international fame.”

McDonnell was formerly chief curator at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, where Chihuly works were a major attraction in a 2003 expansion, the same year the Wichita Art Museum added its Chihuly pieces.

She said the same characteristics are evident in Chihuly’s drawings as the medium for which he’s best known.

“He is as innovative in his methods of drawing as he is with all the different incredible innovations and ingenuity that he’s brought to glass,” said McDonnell, who worked with the artist in selecting the pieces for the Wichita show.

The Wichita Art Museum show, which continues through Sept. 11, is only the second time Chihuly’s drawings have been on exhibit, after a display last year at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma.

Janet Lennon, a spokeswoman for the Chihuly Studio, said the Wichita Art Museum “is a wonderful museum and had just the right exhibition space to present the drawing show.”

Guests so far have marveled at the power and expression in the work, McDonnell said. Some of the drawings are large-scale, as large as 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide, and are backlit.

“You wouldn’t think of a drawing happening on that scale or lit from behind so that the drawings are luminous,” McDonnell said.

Chihuly uses a variety of media in his work, including watercolors, pencil, oils and even a squirt bottle.

“They’re fresh, they’re alive, they have such energy,” McDonnell said. “They’re very animated.”

The drawings, Lennon said in an e-mail interview, have come out of necessity for Chihuly. He suffered injuries in an automobile accident in the late 1970s that caused him to give up the physically demanding position of “gaffer” or chief glassblower.

“Originally a way to convey his ideas to the glass-blowing team, Chihuly’s works on paper have come to be part of his creative process, an initial exploration of the possibilities inherent in a specific subject,” Lennon wrote. “For Chihuly, drawing is a process of discovery, and as such it is an extension of his sculptural work in glass.”

Chihuly usually draws in the “hot shop” where the glass is blown and created, Lennon said.

“He draws just as an artistic practice,” McDonnell said. “But some of the drawings are a way of indicating (instructions) to the team he’s working with.”

This story was originally published July 15, 2016 at 3:10 PM with the headline "Looking past the glass: Chihuly Drawings on display at Wichita Art Museum."