Lipofsky at UC Berkeley in 1968 © Marvin Lipofsky Studio

Marvin Lipofsky’s “California Loop Series”

Considered by Lipofsky to be his first true glass series, California Loops were an innovative direction in the medium of glass and the American Studio Glass Movement. Limited by the availability of colored glass, Lipofsky began experimenting by applying his own color and textures with paint, copper plating, fuming, and flocking. By combining these materials and then “collaging” blown glass parts together, he was able to create forms that were novel; uplifting the sculpture from the pedestal and leaving seductive and tactile experiences in form.

For the 1983-84 edition of the Glass Art Society Journal, Lipofsky was interviewed by the critic Robert Kehlmann regarding the methodology and meaning behind the series:

R.K. Isn't the flocking and the electroplating a denial of the glassiness of the glass?
M.L. Yes. First of all, none of us were good glassblowers. I think a lot of us never became good glassblowers. As a matter of fact, I think that was sort of a saving grace for me. I never got into the ultra-sensitivity of being a super glassblowing person. I've mastered the material well enough to do almost any damn thing I want to do with it, but I would have difficulty putting feet on the bottom of wine glasses. At the start out here, the glass wasn’t very good. It had bubbles in it; we were just learning. I didn’t have a strong chemistry background, nor was I a potter who knew all the different colors.

R.K. So the flocking and the electroplating were meant to cover over uninteresting glass?

M.L. Not exactly. It came about a little differently from that, Robert.

In the end, it came out to be that if something was bad in the glass you just covered it over with paint or flock. But for the record, that wasn't the truth of the matter (laughing). Things were just a lot looser out here in California than they were in the mid-west.

Lots of visitors from all over the world came to the campus and they would always stop by the glass studio to watch the students work. People would wander in and whatever they saw they would say, "Oh, how beautiful this is!” They could pick up the worst things, work by very beginning students, and say, "Isn't this glass beautiful!"

R.K. That's one of the problems with glass.

ML.. That's one of the problems with glass and one of the early things I saw as a problem with glass. So my first thing was to kind of deny the beauty of the glass. That's why I covered it up quite a bit. Underlying all of that also was the fact that the quality of the glass itself wasn't all that fantastic and it was a little boring to see all of these bubbles in it…

Lipofsky’s Loops are in collections at the Corning Museum of Glass, NY; Philadelphia Art Museum, PA; National Gallery of Australia; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, UT; Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Kunstammlungen der Veste Coburg (Museum for Modern Glass), Germany; Museum of Arts and Design, NY; Museo del Vidrid, Mexico; Detroit Institute of the Arts, MI; Yale Art Gallery, CT; the Cantor Center at Stanford University, CA; Glasmuseum Frauenau, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; and others.