[upbeat string music]
[gentle music]
- I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio,
which is a beautiful place,
but five days after I graduated from high school,
I packed the car up with all my stuff
and drove to San Francisco.
Worked for a while and started going to school.
And that's when I decided to become an artist.
Two of my brothers are artists,
and I could see that they were the only people
I knew in society that were allowed
to do whatever they wanted to do.
But at the same time, I had met this woman trying
to do something as an artist with stained glass.
And as an excuse to get to know her,
I asked her to show me how to work with glass.
She had shown me how to cut glass and solder.
And then she kicked me out of her studio
and she gave me the best advice possible.
She said, "Go home and do whatever you want to do."
So I started working on glass with no real training or idea,
and I made a lot of weird, wonderful stuff,
and got my first show at the gallery in San Francisco.
By sheer chance, Cecile McCann of ArtWeek took a liking to me
and gave me two full pages with seven photographs.
And my career was launched.
I mean, it just overnight,
'cause ArtWeek was read all over the United States.
[blow torch hissing]
- I got into glass as a youngster.
My father, Paul Marioni,
started working with glass in about 1970.
He would bring home these lumpy little forms that he made.
And I was so intrigued.
I hadn't seen anything handmade.
I hadn't seen something that was goopy and amorphous.
I knew I was gonna have to try it.
And when we moved here in 1979 to Seattle,
when I was 15 years old,
I did have the opportunity to start blowing glass.
But I was pretty determined
I wasn't gonna follow in his footsteps
or anybody's hippie glass footsteps, for that matter.
It just didn't look like a very easy way to make a living.
And I was right, it really isn't.
When I was still in high school, I met Benjamin Moore.
I worked with him right when I got out of high school
as an assistant on a glassblowing team.
And I just really liked his approach.
He had a design-specific approach to glassmaking
that nobody else did at that time.
He could blow glass on center at will.
From there, I continued to work with Benny
throughout the 80s and 90s, and I still do.
- Everybody, of course,
expected me to be a glass artist.
And it really held no fascination to me.
It's hot, it's difficult, it's boring.
And I was also pretty rebellious.
You know, as much as I could rebel
against the most lenient parent ever, who, y'know,
basically there was very little that we couldn't do.
So people would say, you know,
"Oh, so you're a glassblower too?"
And I would say "No," and usually with profanity included.
[gentle piano music]
I can't get away from it; it's there.
And I worked with my father so much and I know how to do it.
It never held any...
any draw to me whatsoever.
[gentle string music]
I'm doing embroidery on cotton
and I embroider tiny little pictures that I then embed,
either in resin or behind a watch crystal.
I'll set them the way you would set a stone in a bezel.
I make all my own rings and structures that I embed in.
Right now I'm working on a couple of bracelets
using these little pictogram images.
My father one day came to me and said,
"You know, you hate working for people,
it's time you just embraced being an artist."
And 'cause I had never wanted to be an artist before
like him and work for myself,
because I saw him struggle so much.
Jewelry I just started to do,
because at the time I was bartending
and I was thinking about this ring that I had seen one time
and I really wanted it,
but I knew that I couldn't find it anywhere.
So I went and bought just the basics of what I needed
and started with just a little handheld torch
and taught myself how to make jewelry.
Since then, I've worked for myself and,
you know, I've been able to make a living.
I've been very fortunate.
[gentle electric guitar music]
- Dante: I maintain a studio here in this building,
as does my dad, and my dad actually resides here as well.
And my sister, Marina,
has a studio space within Dad's studio.
So yeah, we see each other pretty much every day now.
Where'd you see that, Pop?
- Got an ad for it in the mail today.
So I looked to see who was gonna be there
and saw your name.
- Marina: Seriously? - Mm-hmm.
- What did it say?
"My parents were hippies, cut me some slack."
- Cut me some slack, my parents were hippies.
Marina's got a button. - Mom sent me that.
- You know, Mom and Dad got divorced when we were little.
And after that, it was, I don't know.
That's kind of a strange thing to talk about
'cause, you know, I had a rather alternative upbringing,
I guess you could say.
- Dante And I grew up in Marine County
early to mid 70s, and it was a pretty free and easy time.
And there was a lot of, you know,
I think our family motto was, "Mistakes were made."
It was a lot of, you know, a lot of hippies and free love.
And when my mom left, I was four and Dante was six.
I remember when my father said to us,
"Help me through this," because, you know,
he was in his twenties and had two little kids and no help.
And he was just starting his career as an artist,
which is difficult under any circumstances.
But Dante was a lot more disciplinarian.
Dante was the one who would say, "You're not doing that."
And I'd say, "You're not my father."
He'd say, "I don't care, you're not doing that."
- Paul: I worked for maybe 14, 15 years with Dale Chihuly,
putting the program together at Pilchuck.
What I called the Flat Glass Program.
- Dante: When I first went to Pilchuck,
I'd been hearing about it for years from Dad.
I could tell from how enthusiastic he was about it,
exactly what was going on up there.
And sure enough, the first time I went up there,
I went on my motorcycle.
I was 15, I think.
And as I came riding up the driveway, there's the pond.
It was on a hot summer day.
And there was everybody naked at the pond hanging out,
including my dad.
And he was right, it was an amazing place.
The vibe there was pretty exciting.
- Paul: And then Lino Tagliapietra came to Pilchuck.
Dante was there and then Lino mentored Dante.
So he got the best teachers.
- I am cognizant of how generous
Lino Tagliapietra was to me.
He's shown me everything, and Dick Marquis.
I mean, there's no secrets, y'know.
The only way you learn how to do things like this
is by observing them.
- This one rocks pretty good.
Probably about 10 minutes; basically it's kinetic energy.
And I found through experiments, the sharper the curve,
the slower it rocks.
I tend to like to make faces.
So this is the pattern.
I use a pink foam.
That's the pattern for the finished piece here.
So you can see, I was able to slump this
to this three dimensional curve.
Let me show the whistling vase.
This one wiggles its butt. [laughs]
I thought to myself,
"How far can I reduce the human form
and still make it immediately recognizable?"
Well, the lips will do it and the butt.
- Marina: The difference between my brother and my father
as I see it, is that for my father, he loves glass
because as he says, it captures light.
But to him, it doesn't have to be blown glass.
It can be whatever, kiln cast or sand cast
or whatever way to best convey the message
he's trying to convey,
'cause his work is all about content.
And my brother's work is all about design.
[gentle string music]
My brother believes his craft is conveyed in glass.
He's using his influence of Italian glass,
shape and form and all of that, and color.
- Dante: Just that process of stretching it out
down the hallway,
it looks so simple and it really is, but still,
there's just a whole bunch of different ways
you can mess it up and have it pull too skinny
or really skinny on one end and really fat on the other.
You know, it just it's like anything,
you just have to really pay attention.
And I'm just laying these out so that they all interlock
and then we'll pick them up onto the pipe
and I'll just make a simple cylindrical shape
and make a piece out of it.
[kiln hissing]
Picking this up onto a blow pipe
isn't really as difficult as it looks.
You need to have somebody who knows what they're doing
helping you out.
I could not do it by myself.
You just have to be really conscientious
of the temperature that it's at.
If you do it too hot,
it's gonna want to flop right over onto itself.
If you do it too cold, you're in danger of it breaking
before you can get it back into the fire.
It can be a disaster, and that's happened before.
- Paul: People ask me all the time
if I taught him how to blow glass.
I laugh because of course not.
As a teenager, he had the attention span of a gnat,
and I had the equivalent amount of patience.
[slow electric guitar music]
I've been watching him blow glass since he was 17.
30 years I've been watching him.
I still come down every day and I can't believe it.
You know, he's just so good.
His eye-hand coordination is phenomenal.
His skill level is, I mean, I'm still amazed.
I watch him and go, "How can he do that
and work on that scale?"
Everything has gotta be perfect for Dante.
And he gets it.
Of course, he as tens of thousands of hours' experience.
[upbeat folk music]