Playing With Fire

from Pomfret Magazine — Winter 2020 Issue

by Pomfret School

In Praise of Hagop Merjian

Playing With Fire

Inside Marlene Rose's "heavenly inferno."

Story By Garry Dow

Photos By David A. Monroe, Felix Kunze, and Rich Collins

Marlene Rose ’86 plunges a metal ladle into the flames and scoops out a giant spoonful of molten glass. The kiln is a toasty 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the “lava” emerges from the oven, it emits a deep, almost spectral glow. Carefully and deliberately, she pours the yellow-orange liquid into a nearby mold. Beads of sweat cling to her forehead. The work is hard, dirty, and dangerous — fine art born from an industrial process.

At 52, Rose is considered the foremost sand-cast glass artist in America. “I love the texture of the sand on the glass,” she says. “I love the fact that the glass remembers the sand.” Her stunningly original works are sought after by glass connoisseurs, fine-art collectors, and Hollywood celebrities, and she can be found in more than a dozen art galleries and museums across the US and Europe. She is one of only a handful of artists making glass this way.

“There’s a raw, rugged beauty to Marlene Rose’s work,” writes Florida-based journalist Bill DeYoung. “It’s entirely without the clean, polished fullness of most art glass... It’s earthy, as if it were belched up from the ground alongside minerals and precious stones — something crude and colored, tough and translucent. But with form.”

Heat & Light

Though sand-casting is based on an ancient understanding of metalwork that goes back millennia, it has only been used by modern glass artists for a few decades. Because each mold is destroyed after a single use, the process yields unique sculptures that cannot be replicated.

As far back as 3,600 years ago, Eastern Mesopotamians realized they could melt sand quartz in primitive kilns to make glass beads. Later, Romans and Phoenicians borrowed the process to make glass of their own. But glass in this ancient tradition was concentrated on an industrial scale. It took modern technology and an imaginative Swede named Bertil Vallien to make the process a viable option for studio artists.

Rose, a self-described adrenaline junkie who also rides horses and jumps out of airplanes for fun, refers to the technique as a spectacular process of heat and light. “It is far closer to the fine-art tradition of casting objects, something which appealed to my artistic sensibilities more than the craft-based tradition of blown glass,” she says.

On a typical studio day, Rose spends most of her time (up to seven hours) making the mold. She describes it as “getting the shape right.” She starts by sketching her vision. Once the design is finished, she carves the concept into hard foam and then presses it into a special mixture of moist sand and clay. (The clay acts as a binding material.) In the final stage, Rose pounds the foam into place, vacuums away the excess sand, blackens what remains with acetylene smoke, and sprinkles in a thin layer of powdered glass for good measure. “There is a rawness and immediacy to working the sand of the mold,” she says.

To keep the liquid glass warm in the mold, she continuously blasts it with a blowtorch. If it cools too quickly, the piece will crack and the whole thing will be ruined. Her well-drilled team of four (along with her husband, the architect Thomas Coates) knows exactly what to do and when. “After so many years,” she says, “it’s like a fine-tuned performance where communication exists without words.”

When the glass reaches 900 degrees, Rose carefully cuts away the sand, and carries the piece in fire-warmed mitts to the cooling oven. Over the next hundred hours or so, she will slowly bring down the temperature. Her final act will be to crack open the mold and hold it up to the light.

The result is always serendipitous. Sometimes the glass takes on a hidden hue. Other times it reveals an unexpected texture. “My sculptures celebrate the unique properties of glass, of transparency, of shine and reflection,” she says.

Breaking the Mold

For early artisans, glassmaking was an almost spiritual exercise. They loved and worshiped the material for its seductive beauty and its innate contradictions. For Rose, who has long been fascinated with ancient cultures, the mold fits. “Talk about falling into something really niche and unusual,” she says.

From an early age, the New York native demonstrated an aptitude for the arts. By the time she got to Pomfret in 1982, she had already developed a passion for painting, sculpting, and dancing.

Academics didn’t come easily to Rose, but she credits the faculty at Pomfret for pushing and pulling her to succeed. “They helped me build on the talents that I had and gave me the skills to really learn.” She especially credits her coaches: “I learned so much about teamwork and leadership by being on the various varsity teams. I was fortunate enough to be captain of the lacrosse team my senior year, which has definitely helped me with my business today.”

At boarding school, Rose also forged some of her strongest relationships. “I consider my Pomfret friends some of my closest friends still today,” she says. With her rigorous show schedule, she ends up seeing these friends whenever she’s in their area. “Everyone has been extraordinarily supportive of my career and a number of my Pomfret friends, as well as their parents, have become collectors of my artwork.” In many ways, Rose feels like she had two college educations. “I worked really hard during my years at Pomfret, which set me up so that Tulane was not difficult.”

At Tulane University, Rose studied under the venerable Gene Koss, one of the founders of the American Studio Glass Movement, who first introduced her to sand-casting. “It was experimental, it was dangerous, it was new,” she explains. “Both my painting and sculpting were going well, but the response to my sand-casting was on an entirely different level. I was getting really positive feedback, not just from my professors, but from professionals in the art world. There was something here, and I recognized the fact that something was different. I felt like I found my calling.”

After receiving her BFA from Tulane, Rose went on to earn her MFA at California College of the Arts in Oakland, and then headed north to continue her studies at Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State. In 1992, she finally settled down in sunny Florida. To make ends meet, she worked in art galleries, and even took a turn in public relations, but couldn’t find a place willing (or able) to accommodate her unique style of glassmaking. “The sand-casting process requires a lot of space, and it can get sloppy,” she says. “Glass blowers want it very clean and precise.”

Finally, in 2000, a place in St. Petersburg said yes.

Through the Looking Glass

For the last twenty years, Marlene Rose has been churning out glass sculpture that exudes a timeless quality, with references and allusions to different cultures and civilizations. A rare artist who has discovered a profound way to connect the past and the present, her work reflects both ancient wisdom and modern insight. “I look to these places and peoples of my real and imaginary forebears for the root-inspiration of much of my work,” she says.

At a basic level, sand-cast glass sculpture is a way for Rose to explore the primitive forms that she has been obsessed with since college. Buddhas, bells, and butterflies. African masks. Abstract lines. In her career, she estimates she has cast five thousand pieces, no two ever the same.

Four years ago, she opened The Marlene Rose Gallery near her home in Clearwater. It is a place of polar opposites. Of density and transparency. Of stasis and flux. The very meaning of the pieces changing with the light.

“My goal is to create life in whatever I make. I find myself tugging at the common threads of human imagery, woven through cultures and time. I feel myself riding on this ancient energy. These glimpses of something beyond this present moment become my visions, and they are frozen forever in the icy-hot stillness of glass.”