Paul Stankard
(Attleboro, Massachusetts, 1943 - )
North America, American
Paul Stankard’s glass paperweights and sculptures celebrate the natural world in miniature. Suspended in the stillness of clear glass are blossoms and leaves, roots and insects—so perfectly detailed, so accurate, so sensual and lush—that it is difficult to believe they are not real. Over seventy of these marvels will be on view, all drawn from the largest private collection of Stankard’s work, located in Cleveland.
“Paul Stankard has established the standard by which we judge contemporary paperweight art,” says Dwight P. Lanmon, former director of The Corning Museum of Glass. “His creativity goes far beyond simply evoking nature realistically; his work evidences originality, whimsy, and poetic vision—in addition to technical mastery—which places him in a class by himself.”
Although it may appear that the flowers, insects, and bits of gravel in his paperweights are real objects preserved in crystal, they are, in fact, made entirely of glass. Stankard—widely acknowledged as the living master of the paperweight—is a consummate realist sculptor whose chosen medium is glass.
Glass paperweights first gained popularity in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. By the time Stankard (born 1943) began experimenting with the form in the 1970s, however, many of the traditional techniques had been forgotten. Over the past three decades, he has revived and transformed this nearly lost craft into a vibrant contemporary art form.
This exhibition offers a panoramic view of the artist’s career, made possible by the remarkable breadth and depth of the Cleveland-area collection—one of the largest holdings of Stankard’s work in the world.
Stankard’s early works (in the case to your left) are relatively spare, but he soon began increasing the complexity of his depictions. Starting around 1980, his compositions began to include not only flowers but also roots, stages of development, and even surrounding environments. At the same time, he began to move beyond the traditional round, French-style paperweight—meant to be viewed only from above—by creating pieces that invite exploration from all sides, often including the bottom. One of his most notable innovations is the cube-like format, which he calls “botanicals.” The most recent work in this exhibition suggests he is now exploring a new format: the large glass orb.
In the early 1980s, Stankard also began channeling his imaginative impulses into his glass creations. He introduced text and entirely fictional—but utterly convincing—elements, such as the coronet flower and damselfly. His miniature worlds soon included tiny earth spirits (also called root people) and mask-like faces. According to the artist, these elements are part of “integrating mysticism, informed by botany, into my work…. I explore the cycles of nature with wildflowers as a personal metaphor. The addition of tiny root people and word canes as emblems allude to unseen forces of growth and decay.”
Stankard’s work reveals not only the beauty, but also the complexity and mystery of the natural world. In his hands, the paperweight transcends the realm of the collectible and antique to take its rightful place in the world of fine art.
View objects by this artist.