Mary Beth Bliss

Peter VanderLaan and Mary Beth Bliss began collaborating on hot glass pieces in 1979. Their earliest work was a series of beautiful forms blown by Peter with Mary Beth's etched glass drawings melted into a brilliant matte luster surface. A remarkable spectrum of design possibilities was explored both jointly and separately by both artists over the ensuing years: carved pieces, laminated pieces, beveled glass, etched glass, functional glass and sculptural glass. Yet no matter how far they journeyed into the labyrinth of possibilities offered by glass, they never forgot those early figured pieces. In an updated process based on her earlier work, Bliss has taken dichroic sheet glass and produced complex graphics in it. Coupled up with sheet glass made by her husband, the patterns have yielded to some remarkable composite layering of imagery in Peter's blown forms. Today the couple is producing a series of blown forms, paperweights and jewelry utilizing Bliss's etched dichroic creations that totally challenges the limits of the current use for dichroic glass, while celebrating the forms wrought by VanderLaan's quarter century of immersion in glass.