Dale Chihuly is, metaphorically speaking, re-creating the sledgehammer (though, being a glass artist, he probably has nightmares about them). Since founding the Seattle-based Pilchuk School in the early 1970s, Chihuly has become the center of a community that is to glass what Picasso was to oils and ink.

             Chihuly’s inventions are clever, profound, confounding. Like three-dimensional Rorschach ink blots, they can conjure up myriad referents” weird aquatic creatures, germs seen through a microscope, Martian mammals. They are often large enough to demand a crew of gaffers squire them through the glassblowing process, moving them from ovens to cooling vats.

              One part Cristo, one part P.T. Barnum, Chihuly himself stands out in a crowd, with his eyepatch (a 1975 car accident left him sightless in one eye) and wild whorl of dark hair. To watch him in the studio is to witness some kind of mad scientist hovering over his fragile, polymorphous brainchildren. Because of his sight impairment, he has no depth perception, so he cannot operate the blowtorch. That’s where the gaffers, “Team Chihuly,” come in. They huddle around him while he “storyboards” each phase of an artwork, scribbling sketches, pouring paint on them
à la Jackson Pollock, applying brooms, brush handles or anything else that is required. When he has made his point, the sketches are then scooped up by assistants so that later, eager collectors can pay thousands of dollars for them.

            After the brainstorming is done, the work begins in earnest. The team begins heating and molding the material, while Chihuly waves a hand here, twirls a finger there, like a conductor who must make a whole orchestra hang together. Finally, in a flaming conclusion, Team Chihuly aims the thing toward the “glory hole,” a furnace heated to about 2,500 degrees.

            While Chihuly relies on assistance to solve some logistical problems, he also sees his role as that of mentor. “Engaging other glassblowers in my work was perceived as controversial,” Chihuly remembers. “But working with others was absolutely necessary ... there was so much to learn. I had spent a lot of time in other hotshops overseas and recognized that Americans would benefit from this knowledge.”

            Chihuly is not content merely to create an endless collection of glass masterpieces -- his sense of scale eventually kicks in, an imperative that has resulted in a number of astounding far-flung installations. The 1996 “Chihuly over Venice” extravaganza featured glass art on 14 sites, from a “steroidal starfish” at the Mercato del Pesce di Rialto to the tentacled piece at the Palazzo Ducale. These otherworldly “chandeliers” turned the campos and canals of the city into a carnival of hues, a new chapter in this storied capital of art.

         The Venice installation proved not to be the final word. “I thought Venice was the ultimate city,” Chihuly says. “but the stone and the history of Jerusalem, its complexity, make this an even more fascinating place.” And so the glassblower has mounted a show for the ages,“ Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem 2000,” a Wagnerian epic on display within the walls of the Tower of David through June 2000. “We are going full circle,” Chihuly reflects. “We are returning to the origins of glass 5,000 years ago. Jerusalem is the headquarters of three of the mightiest religions are returning to the origins of glass 5,000 years ago. Jerusalem is the headquarters of three of the mightiest religions of the world, and our crystals are going to help them forget their differences.”

            Certainly there is a larger message here than just art --political religious, cultural. But naturally, the sensory attractions of the enterprise are delicious to Chihuly. Jerusalem, he says, “couldn’t be more beautiful. The juxtaposition of stone, one of the hardest materials to have stood the test of time, and glass, the most frail, transparent material, gave me another reason to work in this great city.” Comprising 18 sections throughout the Tower grounds, “Light of Jerusalem” is a variegated swirl of colors and forms that by turns shocks and delights the eye. Blown in hotshop around the world, from Japan and Finland to France and the Czech Republic, the separate work run the gamut from the symbolic Star to the absolutely abstract Blue Tower. Some of the creations function as faux vegetation, Chihuly style, such as the bulbous Red Saguaros and gargantuan Green grass.

         It’s appropriate that this, perhaps the most dramatic of Chihuly’s installations, is counted in the city that originally inspired the artist. He calls a visit to a kibbutz in the 1960s “a life changing experience. I went from being a boy to being a man.” All of this was personified in “a young man my own age, who had a cause, a purpose in life I went back home and decided it was time to get serious.”

          As a precursor to “Light of Jerusalem,” Chihuly sculpted an ice wall in September 19999 at the beginning of the installation. He had ice imported from Alaska (underwritten by Boeing!), and built a wall out of it, just to watch it melt. True to form, Chihuly created something that was as dramatic as a conceptual stunt, yet there was something else there, on a philosophical level. He meant the wall to symbolize “melting tensions. Anything I could do to help melt tensions over there. I’d like to think it will make people feel good. Jerusalem is still pretty divided, east and west . This happens to be right on the border.”

            And again, he couldn’t deny other fascinating facets of the ice wall. “Alaska is about as far away as you can be from Israel,” he mused. “I’ve always liked the idea of ice in the desert. Everything changes -- color, form; the sun will make it more textured, more milky.” Nothing is more novel than a work of art that changes every few minutes.

          It’s all in a day’’s work for Chihuly. “I work in plastic, glass, ice and neon -- all transparent materials that light can go through ... you’re looking at light itself.” It’s all very elemental, right down to the tools. “The equipment has been basically the same for all that time, Chihuly reflects. “And this is so cheap. It’s just sand and fire.”