Word: stankard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Technical mastery of anything seemed unlikely when Stankard was a youngster. "I was a dreamer. My mother wanted me to be a dentist, but I flunked all my grades." His father, who was a chemist, suggested scientific glassblowing; that appealed to the young Stankard, and he enrolled in a technical school. After graduating he spent a decade working in industry, making glass instruments for laboratories. But the job became increasingly repetitive, and "I would entertain myself by making glass animals and flowers. Then I began experimenting with making paperweights...
...took his paperweights to a crafts show in Atlantic City. There he met Gallery Owner Reese Palley. "The minute I saw his work," says Palley, "I knew that this was the product of a person with an innate understanding of nature." Palley urged Stankard to give up his job and concentrate on fashioning flowers. He would pay him $250 a week to start; in return he would have first refusal on Stankard's work. "What should I do?" Stankard asked his wife Pat. Her reply: Wait for two weeks after the birth of their fourth child. Then...
...Stankard could barely afford to destroy his work because he was desperately short of crystal. In 1975 he solved the problem by ordering $15,000 worth of glass from a Pennsylvania optical glass company. He was earning only $7,000 a year at the time, and he had no savings. To pay the bill, the Stankards renegotiated the mortgage on their house...
Relieved of this worry, Stankard began producing a profusion of wild-flower paperweights: painted Trillium, black-eyed Susan, loosestrife, lady's slipper and prickly pear cactus. Sometimes they were shown in their entire life cycle: bud, blossom and seedpod on a single stem. Sometimes their root systems were shown beneath the earth on the underside of the crystal globe. Even as a child, he had a passion for wild flowers. Now, as a working artist, he improved his knowledge of their shape and form by studying flowers he found growing behind his house or on long walks in New Jersey...
...flowers' appeal, though, was restricted to paperweight collectors; not a world of the arts, but more one of solid, practical investment, rather like that of collecting Christmas plates. Eight years ago, Stankard began encasing his flowers in a crystal block about six inches high, three inches wide. As this new form evolved, he began laminating the blocks with translucent dark green glass on three sides, giving the impression that the plants and their roots are suspended in space, released from their glass prison. The form, which Stankard calls a cloistered botanical, brought his work to the attention of collectors...