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Brian Bowden | profile | all galleries >> Glass ORBits - Contemporary Art Glass Marbles and Other Art Glass For Sale! >> Marble, Paperweight and Pendant Collaborations For Sale >> Mike Gong, Yoshinori Kondo & Daisuke Saito: "Nuthouse Ultimo" Size: 2.20" Price: SOLD tree view | thumbnails | slideshow

Mike Gong, Yoshinori Kondo & Daisuke Saito: "Nuthouse Ultimo" Size: 2.20" Price: SOLD


This is one of the 4 best Gong-Yoshi Acid Eater marbles ever created, and it was made during Mike's Sept-Oct/2013 trip to Japan where he hung out with Yoshi at his studio for a week and they created 5 marbles and several pendants together. They worked 12 hour days on the torch most of the time with SOOO much work going into these masterpiece creations from these two absolute masters of glass and marbles. I think it could be said that these are the two most popular and successful marble artists in the world right now, so creations like this between the two of them are as legendary as they come. Collaborations that are made when the artists are in studio together, as opposed to sending halves or pieces back and forth in the mail, are soooo much better. This approach allows the artists to A) spend lots of time discussing and mapping out their strategy for a particular piece, and B) have the ability to pass the marble back and forth during its creation so they can each work on different designs and different layers many times during the process. The end results from two masters are clearly on a whole different level from anything you've ever seen before in a marble.

So, this marble is not only a collab between Mike and Yoshi, but they ALSO incorporated an unbelievable section of Daisuke's work into the marble making it a triple collab, WOOOHOOOO!!! I must confess that during the photography of this marble, while I had a chance to really study it, I fell in deep, deeeeep love with this marble and am having an EXTREMELY hard time letting it go. I honestly don't care if it ever sells, but since I had stated I would sell it and because of a personal commitment not to hold onto too much, I am putting it up for sale. Whoever gets this marble is one lucky son of a marble collector! Or something like that. If you ever get the chance to see it in hand, you will completely understand. All in all, it's almost too much for the brain to comprehend and process, there is just SO much fascinating glass work going on inside this sphere. I gotta say, THIS is the exact sort of thing that attracted me to the collecting of marbles, the idea that an artist or artists can push the boundaries of what is conceivably possible to do inside the limited confines of a spherical pieces of glass, their glass canvas so to speak. It's not like a sculpture where you have no limitations - here they have to figure out what to do inside a sphere, and what Mike and Yoshi, along with Daisuke's brilliance, have done here is over the top, hard to imagine, assaulting to the senses in the best way possible!

For this acid eater, Mike went with some unusual eyes, the first time he's ever done a 3-color approach like this with the usual red and white, and then black added as well. I LOVE IT!! Very crazy looking, ha haa. It has a shiny gold fumed nose - love it again. Then that mouth!! One of the best I've ever seen, so perfectly formed with a such a sweet tongue, NICE. Lots of fun stuff incorporated all around the face, it's a very festive occasion here. A killer Acid Eater like that should be enough in itself in a marble, but then you flip this champion over and you see more blinding awesomeness. They actually took a HUGE 30mm opal and sandwiched it in the very middle of this marble, PERFECTLY placed, so that you can see it behind the eater (see pics 3 and 4, way better in hand) and in all its glory on the Daisuke side. Daisuke's creation takes up this other half of the marble, but since it's all fuming, the opal shines through brighter than the sun. And speaking of the sun, with certain angles, it actually LOOKS like the sun, where it is all bright orange! I couldn't get the camera to capture that angle like it looks in hand, but trust me, it will blow you away. This opal is just legendary, and its use is pure perfection.

So then you have Daisuke'

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