We recently connected with Marlene Rose and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Marlene, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
This is a long answer! But to know the whole journey sometimes you just have to start at the beginning. The beginning was New York. Marlene was being edged into an entry job as a runner in a large, faceless financial institution. She quickly realized where this might lead and decided that there was much more to see and experience in the wide, wide world. So she moved to New Orleans in the early 80’s. What a better place to see the world!
Once in New Orleans, she realized she was on a path far from the culture in which she was born and raised. But a combination of factors almost caused Marlene to miss her true calling of becoming a sand cast glass sculpture artist. After enrolling at Tulane University, she threw herself into the arts, but initially she was not interested in working with glass. “I avoided glass as hard as I could – I wanted something more visceral. I am petite and female and I was somewhat intimidated by the physicality of working with hot glass and, frankly, the whole thing was male-dominated.”
Eventually, she was forced to take a class with Gene Koss, one of the first experimenters in sand casting glass. She “reluctantly showed up…and was mesmerized.” Professor Koss changed Marlene’s perspective on glass when he said, “I’m going to show you how to blow glass and get that out the way. Then I am going to show you how to make SCULPTURE!” It was a light bulb moment for Marlene: “He had me at ‘sculpture!’”
Koss had just recently mastered the ancient art of sand casting glass, with its traditional roots in metal casting going back to the Iron and Bronze ages. Glass made this way was generally produced on an industrial scale. The technique wasn’t used to create glass objects until the early 1980s when “the heating and very controlled cooling of glass became viable on a studio level, where individual artists could create their own unique pieces of art.”
Although Marlene knew this was the path for her, the journey to success has not been easy. She worked at practically anything to make enough money to cast glass. “Initially I had the brief and temporary use of a tiny facility. It was certainly not ideal – hot, sweaty and cramped – but I made glass. Not the big stuff I wanted to do, but enough to plant a seed for my future.” There were times she felt like giving up, but she turned things around by following her intuition and working hard.
Then, a combination of good timing, preparedness and luck helped Marlene secure her big break. “I happened to swap one of these small pieces of glass I had made with a friend for a page in a local magazine, which got read by a future client. They showed it to an initially reluctant gallerist, who suddenly got excited and gave me a showing at the premiere glass show in the world.” When Marlene attended the Sculpture Objects Functional Art and Design (SOFA) Fair in Chicago, people loved her work and more importantly, bought it! However, this left Marlene, like many successful women in the arts trade, with the perfect problem – how to meet the increase in demand for her work.
Finding a studio was challenging: “I was struggling to find a foundry that would take me on as a caster and let me make the large-scale work that I really wanted to do.” Many studios do not want sand casters in their space. “We use a whole pot of glass (400 pounds) in an afternoon, leave sand everywhere, and fill all the annealers (cooling ovens) for a week.” But Marlene was not about to give up on her dream – she kept looking, until one day, luck struck again.
“I met an adventurous studio owner and he said if I raised a certain (not inconsiderable) amount of money, he’d convert part of his studio for casting.” After saving for what felt like years, Marlene reached the target and went back to the studio owner, who said, “Keep the money – let’s make some glass!” Marlene thinks he was testing her. It must be admitted, at the time, Marlene seemed an unlikely candidate for the creation of her bold dreams. But the studio owner saw the light in Marlene and took a chance on her. Twenty-five years later, it seems to have paid off!
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
For Marlene, “Glass is a medium to share ideas and feelings.” Her goal is to bring life to whatever she works on, which is reflected in what people say when they first see her sculpture – they feel an ‘aliveness’ within it. “I hope my work evokes in its viewers something they have not seen or felt before,” says Marlene.
I look to these places and peoples of my real and imaginary forebears for the root-
inspiration of much of my work. I find myself tugging at the common threads of
human imagery, woven through cultures and time, weaving and recomposing their
nuances, making them in new ways that communicate the immortal vibrancy of
the human spirit.
Part of every piece refers to a distant, only partly understood system of symbols
that derive their power and strength from the common core we share with our
ancestors. I feel myself riding on this ancient energy, and in the glass I make I see
a strong presence that reaches out through time, linking the shards of what I have
seen, linking these unnamed emotions, these visions, and these part-remembered
memories of the past, linking them to a future I had half-forgotten.
These glimpses of something beyond this present moment become my visions,
and they are frozen forever in the icy-hot stillness of the glass.
Marlene Rose simply breathes life and beauty into whatever she makes.
I use a process based on the thousands-year-old tradition of bronze casting, adapted only recently for glass.
I make a shape and then press it into a bed of damp sand, sand that has just a little bit of powdered clay sifted into it, just enough so that when you pack the sand tightly around the shape, you can pull the shape out and the sand will retain in great detail the form that was pressed into it.
At this point I “paint” the surface of the sand with various shades of powdered colored glass.
Then I pour 2,000-degree liquid molten glass into the sand mold. After ten minutes or so I pick up the still burning hot glass and place it into a special computer-controlled cooling oven where it will slowly come to room temperature over six days or so.
Glass most nearly captures the essence of the human spirit, with its ever-changing moods. Glass may seem solid, and then a moment later burst with fire. As you move past a piece, you never twice see the same vision. It is the most alive of all materials.
One of my recent projects is opening a Gallery in downtown Clearwater, right next to a great new Coachman Park. It provides a glimpse into my world, quite different from what one might expect. The gallery is a nexus where I can meet new and old collectors to show them my latest work.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1. Persistence! Never give up! Do not believe what they tell you, even if it sounds quite true. Your journey is your unique journey and how it is for others is not how you can make it for you.
2. Curiosity! How can I make this better? How can I more exactly capture the essence of what I wish to portray?
3. Communication! The essence of art is the quality of communication. It’s a constant struggle to figure what I want to say, figure out how to portray that in glass, and then figure out to make bring it into reality. Then, once the piece is created, how do I let my collectors and the whole wide world know what I have done? It seems as an artist, only a small part of my creation goes into the making of a piece. There is also the creation of a business to show my work to the world. This is often neglected part of an artist’s journey. It is one thing to be able to create something, but it is an entirely different enterprise to bring that idea to market. This is a complete set of skills that must be learned by any artist to survive and survive well.
Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?
My parents exposed me to a variety of experiences from sports to business to the arts. I find that every day I am using something related, however distantly, to their love and care for me. I like to think that I can share with my own two daughters, now teenagers, some essential part of the love that was shown to me.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.marlenerose.com
- Instagram: @marleneroseglass
- Facebook: marleneroseglassart
Image Credits
Felix Kunze Jen Anderson
