After working in the New York as an artist and teacher for seven years and spending summers at Pilchuck, I moved to the Czech Republic. I wanted to make a life-size, hollow cast glass dress. I knew the piece would be technically very complicated and since the world renown center for large scale casting is the Czech Republic, I decided to pack my bags and go for it.
    
     Although I was not inspired by the Czech glass art I had seen exhibited in the states, I was very impressed with its technical excellence. It seemed to me that Czech artists were still stifled and stagnated by forty years of communism. It was a stark contrast to the movement I was leaving in the States which was exuberant with artists constantly producing, filled with spontaneity and exploration. Therefore, when I came to the Czech Republic, I was focused simply on learning casting techniques.

     I have been surprised to discover that the Czech glass art movement is abundant and in many ways more mature and diverse than in the States. The differences between the two movements can be largely attributed to their beginnings. To understand, you have go back to the end of W.W.II. After years of Nazi occupation, Czechoslovakia expelled most remaining Germans, which included many of the owners, technicians, designers and decorators of the once flourishing glass industry. To save the industry, a number of recent graduates from the Applied Arts Academy in Prague went to the factories and literally taught them how to make and use glass. The artists, in turn, were able to set up small ateliers within the industrial complexes and had access to unbelievable resources for their personal work, including skilled factory workers. These young artists became the mothers and fathers of the Czechoslovak industrial and studio glass art movements and their names - Libensky, Roubicek among the many - and their formal style are still synonymous with Czech glass.

     During 1950's Stalinism, all 'art' had to conform to the government approved Social Realist style. For a variety of reasons, glass art largely escaped repression and censorship. As a result, many painters, sculptors and other artists sought refuge in glass art, introducing to the glass movement many people with no technical skills or experience with glass, only the desire to use this material as a vehicle for their ideas. Thus, the Czechoslovak glass movement began with an abundant variety of expression in glass when the first studio glass furnaces had not even been built in the United States!
    
     This influx of non-glass artists furthered the traditional European divide between artist and fabricator. This contrasts starkly with the start of the studio glass movement in the US where the biggest hurdle has been manual skills and glass working facilities and, as a result, being a great technician has been more prized than being a great conceptualist.
    
     In addition, these two approaches to handling the material have formed dramatically different glass art communities. In the US, glass artists are forced to work together to build studios, act as skilled assistants to each other, and learn in centers like Pilchuck and UrbanGlass. This creates a dynamic environment in which interaction is mandatory. In the Czech Republic, there is not such a cohesive community. Instead, artists work independently, grouping themselves into other categories around ideology, generation, or exhibition gallery. Perhaps I had difficulty appreciating how inspired and vivacious the contemporary Czech glass art movement is because of its disparate almost secretive nature.

CASTING GLASS
    
     I came to learn casting and was lucky to start in the studio of Zdenek Lhotsky, in the small town of Pelechov. Lhotsky's studio was originally founded in the 1950s by Jaroslava Brychtova and used by Brychtova and Libensky to make much of their work. It specializes in making large scale cast glass on a magnitude impossible anywhere else.

     I was a little nervous to introduce my dress project to Lhotsky since it differs so greatly from Czech glass, but he was exited by the idea itself and enthusiastic about the challenge of making such a complicated piece. The mold-makers themselves were even more exited - it was refreshing for them to see something new. Before tackling the adult size, I started with a child's dress. My request to work with them in the studio and learn from them piqued their interest. They jokingly called me a spy as I took notes and photos of every step of the process, but I think they were flattered by my recognition of their expertise, particularly because Czech glass casting is suffering from a lack of local interest amongst younger craftsmen. There are no young workers in the factory and the youngest mold maker is over 50. Lhotsky explained that no young people from Pelechov were willing to work so hard for so little money. They would rather have a more modern, well paid job or no work at all. The skills these craftsmen have developed over the past 30 years are not taught in any academic glass program and will be lost. Although I have quite a bit of casting experience from the States, I learned more in making molds with them than I ever could have expected!

WORK BY CZECH ARTISTS
    
     For me, it has been exiting not only to learn these techniques, but to see the breadth of work being made in the Czech Republic especially since before coming here all I was exposed to was the work of the more established generations. To show this breadth as well as the varying attitudes of the artists toward their material, I have choosen a variety of glass work simultaneously being made in the Czech Republic.

LIBENSKY-BRYCHTOVA
   
    Because Libensky-Brychtova are so famous and their work so significant, there is an incredible amount of information available about them. So I will not attempt to go into detail here. I will only include a photo of their most recent Japanese installation.

EVA VLASAKOVA & PAVEL JEZEK
    
    Although also husband and wife, the work of Eva Vlasakova and Pavel Jezek is completely different. Vlasakova describes her work: "my figures and animals are not realistic, they are part of a fantasy life. I don't want to make my pieces too beautiful, polished and precious - I like to show that glass was cast from a model, that first it was sculpted by my hands and fingers and I tried to put soul into it."

    Jezek's work is strikingly different, formidable despite its clean and simple appearance. According to Jezek: "what bothers him about glass is an elegance so excessive as to become a kind of superficiality, a shine and luster which drowns out the idea behind the work." Jezek is able to temper this excessive beauty in his massive but elegant pieces.

ZDENEK LHOTSKY
   
    Although he is the director of the Pelechov studio, Lhotsky's main emphasis is still his own creative expression. He has led a fascinating fight against complacency both in himself and in others since before the end of Communism. While still a student under Libensky, he and six other artists created a group called "The Stubborn." At a time when it was still dangerous, they were committed to freedom of expression and developed a new artistic concept that radically changed the situation of fine arts here.

Most interesting to me is how both his business and art integrate his drive for progress and modernity with his desire to preserve a dying craft. In his own words, he is seeking sources of fire and wind to sweep through Czech glass art and design since this is the only way to save what remains. An example of this integration is his website which he runs from a small town in the Czech countryside. This spring he has a show at the Czech Center in New York.

Dan Hanzlik and Pavel Mrkus
    
    Dan Hanzlik and Pavel Mrkus are two artists who graduated from the Applied Arts Academy in 1995. They are of the emerging generation of conceptualists. They identify themselves with post-modernists like Jiri Cernicky, not other glass artists.
    
    For Hanzlik every material is encompassed by and saturated with his concept. "When I use glass, it is not just because it is a beautiful material. I use the specific optical qualities of this material. I make light installations and kinetic installations." Hanzlik uses prisms to break light into it's component colors, thus he is able to work with true or pure color.

    Similarly, Mrkus uses glass when he want to work with light. "To get a sense or feeling of light. In large installations, I make some small part of it in glass to make it feel more intimate." Mrkus comments about US glass artists "they work a bit different from me. They use color…. for me it's not so free I always have to have some exact meaning in using a color. They are nice things, nice to look at and well done, but they do not have meaning."