(contemplative electronic music) (torch whirring) - [Dale] I love the way this clear looks.

When you talk about glass...

I might wanna have those things sticking out.

- [James] Yeah.

- Only the one right there.

- This one?

- Yeah.

(torch whirring) (contemplative music) You know, this series that I call Rotolo, which means coil in Italian, I started it, I think, just to see how big we could go, how much glass could we handle, and I started making these coils, Rotolos.

And as soon as I made one and it was cooled down, I could see the quality of glass.

I had forgotten how powerful clear glass can be.

(torch whirring) - In 2013, I was asked to go to Boston to do a glass blowing demonstration.

And normally, I do these demonstrations and I make these very intricate, Venetian style goblets and vessels.

And I remember getting on the plane in Seattle and flying to Logan, and I'm getting my bags at the baggage claim, turn my phone on, and there's four or five missed calls and messages from Dale.

(torch whirring) And so when I called him back, he told me, "Jimmy, I've got this idea to make a piece with a bunch of really thick coils and maybe we'll put it on a vessel.

I'm not really sure what we'll do, but I wanna make it big, as big as we can."

- Having worked with Dale for so long, you knew something was gonna come out of it.

What it was, nobody knew, you know?

He didn't even know.

He just wanted to go the hot shop, push these guys.

- [Dale] Maybe I'll just have you do a round inside.

- [James] Mm-hmm.

- Medium blue with clear coils.

Have the coils go up over.

- [James] Uh-huh.

- And try to make the whole piece longer instead of wider.

- [James] Okay.

- [Dale] Does that seem doable?

- [James] Yes.

- [Dale] I'm putting these out here as well.

- [James] The points?

- [Dale] I want those sticking out.

- [James] Okay.

- Maybe out even more than they do naturally.

So, the whole thing will have- - Points on it?

- Yeah.

Like the drawing.

(torch whirring) No, don't tuck it in, Michael.

Leave it, leave it out like that.

- Okay, you got it.

- [James] Okay.

(torch whirring) - See, they're only sticking out that far.

- It makes a difference.

It's really nice.

- Yeah.

(torch whirring) That's good.

No.

Put it back down the other way.

Good.

I didn't want them to end up looking like this.

- [James] Yep.

- [Dale] What's our poundage?

- [James] It's probably very similar to the last one.

- That's the one that weighed 87?

- [James] This weighs more than that.

- The top looks better now.

Add another coil up there.

- Yeah.

- A little better.

- [James] Wait, has it healed?

- I'd have to look at it more.

The difference is, almost all my work is fairly controlled, where the loops would be the same.

- [James] Yeah.

- [Dale] And- - [James] This is definitely more gestural, no doubt.

- Yeah.

There may not be enough Chihuly in this piece for me.

- [James] Really?

- It looks very good, don't get me wrong.

We'll just keep making them and we'll look at 'em and see what we like.

I think of it as one big show, all of these pieces being in a room- - Last flash.

- 10 or 15 pieces.

- Yep.

- [Dale] All with clear coils.

- [James] They'll look beautiful.

- [Dale] And this might fit in very nicely.

- [James] Well, this is close to 48 inches.

- I guess that's about as tall as we're gonna make them.

But that's tall enough.

- [Darryl] Watch the top.

- Okay, go go, go, go.

Nice and easy.

- [Dale] Yeah.

Hold on, Jimmy.

It was starting to go over.

And Jimmy, of course, wants to go bigger and bigger.

All right, we'll go to work.

- Okay.

- Again and again, Chihuly managed to go beyond the purely nice, decorative.

He goes just one little step beyond.

I mean, okay, big glass object, beautiful, grand, and yet, wait a minute, there's always something.

Well, this is what the art that we can't explain.

(torch whirring) - Part of the reason I started this series was I wanted to give Jim a real challenge to see how far he could really go.

I consider him one of the best glassblowers in the world.

Even though his own work is often very delicate and small, he has the capability of working larger, really, larger than anybody I know, and he has a great team to back him up.

Wild.

- And that's just two wraps.

I mean, we could really build it up.

- Yeah.

Yeah, definitely something there.

- Do you like them when they're coming off the vessel like that?

- Yeah.

- And it's nice when he's there directing the whole thing because he'll see things that I don't and he'll tell me and I think I'm able to do what he wants after all these years of working together.

- Some nice colors on there.

- I think so.

I would lay these giant coils on this cylinder and just kind of let 'em go wherever they went, and they turned out okay, but it wasn't exactly what he had in mind.

Grab it.

Lift.

- Wild, wasn't it?

All right, that's a start!

Piece number one.

- That's a start, huh?

- Yes.

That was a hell of a piece.

- It was interesting.

Is that what you had in mind?

- I thought of it a little tighter than that.

There were a couple Venetians made kind of like that.

- Yeah.

- I mean, they weren't that big.

- Right.

- And they were clear.

- They were.

- Yeah.

And guess what?

The interior shape was not a cylinder.

I think it was more of a round, which would be nice, too.

I like the fact that you didn't have to force it to do anything.

You know, you pretty much- - Yeah, well, on that scale, it's- - [Dale] You gotta go with the flow.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, let's make a clear one.

- [James] Do you wanna think about just wrapping and wrap, and just keep doing that?

- [Dale] And not have any things coming out?

- Yeah.

I like the things coming out, but- - I do, too, but it'd be nice to see one that didn't.

- Yeah.

- Or maybe just came out a little bit.

And of course, it would look a lot different if they were all one color.

- [James] Yeah.

You think better?

- It would feel like it's all the same wrap.

- [James] One piece, yeah.

That's interesting.

That's a good point.

- I don't know if that's better, but it would definitely have a different feeling.

And the clear would, you'd be able to really see through the clear one.

The clear one, one that we did, which I never, I don't think it's ever been published.

One I can remember distinctly was a round ball- - [James] And all coils.

- [Dale] All coils and it stood on coils.

- [James] Yep.

Yeah, no, I remember that one, too.

- [Dale] Lino came to me after, I don't know when it was, 1987.

And he'd been teaching at Pilchuck and he said, "I'd love to work with you."

And I didn't know if I could work with Lino 'cause I thought I probably had to work symmetrically.

But that winter, I went to Venice and I saw this fabulous collection of art nouveau and art deco.

It was mostly art deco from the '30s by these great designers like Scarpa.

So, this collection really influenced me.

I decided I'd bring Lino back.

He went to Pilchuck, I think, again and he came and worked with me and we started the Venetian series.

- The early Venetians were Dale doing these beautiful charcoal pencil drawings and very loose.

And Lino, of course, would look the 'em and he would get on the floor and start using a lot of these techniques that he learned as a kid, and teenager, and adult in the factories.

So, there was so much information and history put into these pieces.

And Lino's tremendous skill as a great maestro and Dale as a visionary, it was a perfect combination.

But there is that one image of Lino making one of the first Venetians and you were drawing it out.

- And do it like this, and then go there and do it another time.

- And he did something like that where he took a big, long rope and just kind of wrapped it on the piece.

But I think it was only one, maybe two.

And then I think he put some other things on, flowers and leaves.

But it made me think about that wrapping.

- It's a question of what do we do next?

If you're ready to do it and I'm not here, make it clear.

- I had been at the studio for maybe five or six years at that point working with Dale, but he was always trying to loosen me up.

- [Dale] Let's get a little more radical now.

Let's not start making them all the same.

Blow it up a little more.

Get more wrinkles.

And you did it, pretty much.

Now, you can do it even more on the next one.

- Okay.

And from before that time, I had been making cylinders and trying to make them perfectly straight.

- Beautiful.

- Look at that gorgeous thing.

- [James] And in a way, most glassblowers, that's how they work.

- We could do a few with a crooked neck just for the hell of it.

There you go, there you go.

There you go right there.

Do whatever it does, do whatever it does.

Just make sure you don't touch down.

But you can see how much action you can get.

- You know, Dale's gotta come in there and kind of break that symmetry out of you.

So, he'll try to get you to loosen up as much as he can.

- [Dale] Those are very nice too.

Let's make a few of those.

Those are beautiful.

- And it's just like breaking a horse probably.

You don't want things to go off center and Dale insists that if you don't do it, it's not gonna look good.

- See, some of them went straight, some of them curved a little, some of them curved a little a more.

Let's be all- - [James] And he's always right about stuff like that.

- I've only worked on this series for about seven days, maybe less.

And I'm doing one day a week.

They have to be in the oven for four days.

If everything goes well, we can make three pieces from 7:00 in the morning 'til noon, taking a couple hours each.

By that time, our 1,200 pound furnace is almost out of glass.

- And when he would do the drawings, I would continually say, "Yeah, I'll give it a try.

I'd love to do it."

And he knows that's my personality to try anything even though I might think it's impossible to do.

(torch whirring) - It's gonna be heavier than we've ever had.

- All of a sudden, they got to be three, four feet tall plus, four and a half feet tall.

(torch whirring) If you say you can go big, he said, "Well, go bigger and just see what happens."

And if it hits the floor on occasion, well, you know, hopefully you learn something from that, and it never seems to deter Dale from telling you to start up another one.

- We're not gonna hit 100% on these, that's for sure.

- No, but the more we do 'em, the better we're gonna get.

- Yes.

Absolutely.

- [James] Thanks, Dale.

- The Rotolos, we had so many problems with them that I worked on other series in between.

So, like, I worked on those orange baskets, again, with Jimmy Mongrain being the gaffer.

- You know, because of the success rate of the Rotolos, I think both of us kind of needed to retreat a little bit and think about why these were breaking and if we could even make them, if it was possible to have these survive.

And in between those times, he would come in and we would kind of revisit old series and he was always excited about doing something new and pushing it, making it bigger.

- That orange is so powerful, if this were down to here.

Oh, look at that.

Now, watch this beauty.

Yeah, nice.

Good going.

(laughing) I'm looking at this hole that you've got, which I like.

See this hole that goes down?

- Yeah, I like that.

That's great.

Right there?

- Yeah.

- Leave it?

- Leave it.

Hey, can you help me lay out these drawings?

- [Parks] Yeah, sure.

- See that pile?

I want to just lay 'em out one by one all the way down the wall.

- [Parks] Okay, I'm just putting up the ones you picked.

- Yeah, okay.

We'll call that number one.

- [Parks] We have number one.

- [Dale] Let's take a look at the next one.

- [Parks] Yeah.

- Okay.

Now, we're gonna take the blue Rotolo down and put up the red one.

Do we have three new Rotolos out on the Evelyn table?

I'm really anxious to see 'em.

When will they be on the table?

No.

All three pieces broke, Parks.

No, that's all right.

Let me digest that first.

Okay.

Is Jimmy there?

- We would get maybe one out of a blow, sometimes zero, which was painful.

That was a hard call to make to Dale saying, "Hey, Dale.

None of these pieces made it."

After a full day of work, 14, 15 people on the crew, eight or nine days of annealing, take 'em out and they're all cracked.

- Yeah, look at the quality of that glass.

- Yeah, that's nice glass.

- So nice.

- Yep.

- How long did they anneal for?

- About 72 hours.

- 72?

That's not long enough for these.

I mean, I'd like to know that that's what caused 'em to crack so I won't worry now.

We just need a longer cycle.

Oh, and we're doing a blow, and when is it?

About a week or something?

- [James] Yeah.

- Definitely seven full days.

- [James] The thicker glass gets, the longer it needs to anneal.

And annealing is basically, it's a big box at 1,000 degrees approximately and it comes down to room temperature in a certain time, pending on how thick the glass is.

And some of those Rotolo bases are five, six inches thick, and the coils are thick and touching each other and everything has gotta work just perfectly.

So, the annealing brings it down to a temperature where it's stable.

In the case of the Rotolos, it takes seven or eight days.

- [Dale] For most of the last four years, they were coming out cracked.

And in the beginning, 100% of them were cracked.

I can't tell you how many times I thought about stopping.

Jimmy kept thinking that maybe we could solve it somehow.

- [James] I'm sure his confidence in me making these pieces wasn't that high.

And I have to say that my confidence in myself wasn't that high.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why these pieces were cracking.

- [Dale] We can only make three a day, and even that, we only get one out of three that's not screwed up in some way or another.

Not everybody's so keen on me working on Rotolos 'cause we only get one piece a day.

- [James] And all I could do, if we had to wait 10 days to look at 'em, is try to figure out one little thing to change the next time we do it.

We started annealing them for seven days, and then I think maybe nine days, and they still cracked.

So, we kind of ruled out that is was annealing.

And Jimmy kept having ideas about the way you might put them on.

- [James] These coils have a life of their own.

You put one on and it just wants to go everywhere.

You're trying to control it and not bend it too much and move it too much where it's gonna crack.

- [Dale] You know, really, it was up to him to figure it out, and he figured it out with his hands.

- You know, what can happen is the skin of the glass can cool quicker than the inside, so if you bend it too quickly and the skin is too cold, it will create little cracks.

- Eventually, Jimmy came up with a way with those heatproof gloves where he could actually close in on them with his gloves.

- [James] And so I would have Drea torch the end, and while I'm rolling this coil on this piece of plywood, she would torch the base a little bit and I would push it on.

And so it had a hot to hot connection.

And the same with every connection, I tried to make sure we have heat to heat and that it's the hottest part touching the hottest part.

- [Dale] You know, that's pretty unusual to see a glassblower touching the glass.

- [James] And they would be in the Evelyn room here.

At just the right time of day, the sun would hit 'em and they would just pop like diamonds.

- [Dale] When you get that sun on that glass, there's something about that room and the bridge.

I've always felt something special about that bridge.

It's interesting 'cause that's where the glass naturally goes.

It goes from the hot shop to the annealing oven, and then out to the Evelyn room, and it can stay out there for quite a while and you get a chance to really look at it.

- I was privileged to see some of them in the making.

They're like the biggest glass object that you could physically make.

And yet, when you look at the results, I mean, they're very heavy, but they look light.

Dale pointed out something, that, of course, the light goes through them.

You know, they're standing here against the light and look from the other side, it's two worlds.

It's a sublime experience.

- [Dale] So, I'm taking my time, heading towards that major decision as to whether or not I want to exhibit them.

It's so different than anything I've ever done that I have to make sure I feel as good about it when I show 'em as I do now.

- It's amazing, to me, that Dale kept his interest, knew his vision, trusted me, maybe.

There were times, I'm sure, he thought this is ridiculous.

I mean, why should we keep doing this if every time we do it, we're losing 80%?

But we did.

So, what I started doing is taking three coils and I would push these connections onto this piece as hard as I could.

- [Dale] So, the more we did that, the more they started coming out.

Now, we're up to about 100%.

This probably just doesn't go dark.

- No, it doesn't, I don't think.

Yeah, you can't put enough of that on.

- [Dale] Maybe now, we'll start increasing the number of coils.

But three looks so good that I'm not really concerned about whether they have four or five.

- So, it could be nine or 10.

- [Dale] A lot of people are interested in them and we have exhibitions coming up where people wanna show them.

- So, I encountered Rotolo for the first time on our first visit to the studio and it sort of struck us that this is a series of objects that we would love to have in the context of the history of the work that Dale has created.

So, going to Seattle and really sitting down at the Boathouse with Dale and Leslie and the team to sort of think about what could this look like, how grand of an experience we could create.

- [Tom] Going into the exhibition design, once we knew that the objects weren't gonna fall apart on their own, then it became an idea of how do you integrate these into Dale's cycle of works, and does he want to?

- Everyone was a little bit nervous about it.

They were like, "Is it the right moment to present this work?

Is it the right context?"

And if we're gonna do this, we have to do it perfectly because it's sort of that challenging time when an artist reveals themself through their work.

But we pushed 'cause we really wanted to include it as something new, and interesting, and monumental in the space.

(contemplative electronic music) Our thinking about trying to place Dale within the construct of American art history was important, and thinking about how to present him in a way that was in the context of our collection 'cause our collection spans four centuries of American art.

I think the team at Chihuly Studios was really excited to show a range of work that could make those connections.

- [Tom] From the inception of the idea to the actual uncrating them at the museum was probably a good four years.

Dale was really happy with 'em.

- [Dale] So, I rolled the dice, which I usually don't roll the dice when doing some brand new for a show.

- For me, this is a very moving moment because I remember the first visit to your studio.

- [Dale] And we were making the Rotolos.

- [Andreas] And you were making Rotolos, and we saw them on the long table.

And now they're here.

- [Dale] I knew that you wanted some Rotolos for the show.

- [Andreas] Yeah, definitely.

- [Dale] And I'm really glad that you insisted upon that.

- Obviously, something to the imagination, I think the Rotolos are a fantastic example for that.

Although the form is wild and baroque, actually, they're quite reduced, awe-inspiring, and subtle.

And allowing the viewer, the beholder to bring him or her self in.

That's why I'm very proud to bring it to Groningen and very, very curious in how far the public will follow this.

- [James] For a year, we've been putting three coils on and Dale and I were talking about maybe trying to go back and revisit the beginning stages of making Rotolos.

- Do you wanna try one with five?

- Let's try it, yeah.

- Do you wanna do it on this one?

- Why not?

- Well, we could do it on this one.

- [Paula] Yeah.

Strike while the iron's hot.

- There's one piece that's kind of stickin' straight out so I can either push it down or bring it back up.

- Down.

- Okay.

How's it look, Drea?

Last flash!

No more?

- Good.

- That's it.

For the past four years, he did have this vision about how these pieces were going to look and supposed to look, and he would do drawings, and some were round and had a lot of coils and then some beautiful fluid one or two.

I think we're at the point now where he wanted to be.

It's amazing that it took four years to get here.

And you never know, there could be another series right around the corner.

(contemplative electronic music)