Though it may seem hard to believe, his globes and cubes bursting with flowers and foliage are made entirely from glass by the renowned glass artist Paul Stankard, largely considered to be the father of lamp-work glass. Born in 1943 as the second of nine, Stankard’s work is unmistakably and instantly recognisable.
His glass flowers are so real looking and botanically lifelike that many people mistakenly think that he had found a way to encase actual flowers in glass. Stankard is a pioneer in the studio glass movement and his lamp-work techniques have helped change the course of artistic glass for the last few decades.
After battling undiagnosed dyslexia for his entire youth (at one time graduating the bottom of his class), Stankard struggled greatly to identify his life’s calling. While in college he discovered scientific glass blowing, the manual process of creating scientific instruments out of glass for use in laboratories. He was instantly hooked and for 10 years worked with industrial glass.
His work is represented in more than 60 museums around the world including the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre and the Victoria & Albert Museum. In 2007, Stankard published an autobiography titled No Green Berries or Leaves: The Creative Journey of an Artist in Glass.