As Ro approached 50 years of blowing glass, he decided to make some AMAZING tributes to his career, these RetRoSpective murrini plaques, which feature layers of his murrini from the past almost 50 years. They are mind bogglingly awesome piece of Ro's history and glass history in general, displaying decades of work in the making. They each come matted in an attractive black frame which will stand on its own or can be hung. Each plaque is unique and signed with the 'Ro 22' sig chip. Without further ado, let me have Ro tell you more about this project:
"The story of my new ’RetRoSpective’ piece.
In 1983 as my then partner Dick and I began to make murrini for our first Noble Effort Design pieces a situation became apparent that I would imagine every glass artist comes to grips with in the same way; What to do with all the broken cane, murrini pieces that are too big or small, too thick or thin, chips that are half gone, and all the small pieces that just wind up on the bench that are too special to just throw away? Add to this all the perfectly good murrini that filters down to the bench and is just too much trouble to categorize and put away. What to do with all this detritus? We viewed this assemblage akin to the ’Teeth of the Elk’ that was left over after the tribe used the entire Elk in all the various ways one would use said Elk. It was our duty to find a use for the ‘teeth’. One can’t simply throw away any part of the Elk that gave it’s life so that you may live, or, similarly, any part of the very expensive colored glass we all use as a fundamental building block of our art. The concept/idea for the solution for this was a bit obscure and out of focus……….. I decided to wait until I had collected enough to make a good showing of it and put it all together to make something incredible….. A thousand colors and stories put together in…… something. Two years ago I decided to finally make that ‘something’ from the jars and trays of ‘bench sweepings’ that I had collected since 1983. I thought it would be fitting to finally make ‘something’ from this fabulous resource during my “Fifty year celebration of trying to keep a glass furnace running” but it took me until now to get to it [I still consider what I came up with as a part of that ‘Celebration’ due to the historical nature of it]. I always assumed the object would be a marble but in a crushing defeat I was immediately proven wrong on a technicality upon my first tries at making the marbles. The reason for this failure was the dreaded but all too common problem of the ‘coefficient of expansion’ of different colors of glass rearing it’s ugly head. Certain glass colors simply expand and shrink at different rates during the heating/cooling process and break along the interface between them. Many of the pieces that found their way to my benches in the last 39 years were from instances of incompatibility that torpedoed great ideas and color combinations in my marbles. When I made the new [very large] marbles last month they were incredible to look at but every one of them had stress cracks between the clear outer layer and the color pieces throughout, signaling the end of the idea immediately. No way around that one! The Wonderful combination of so many pieces and explosion of color was too much to just let go of however. That’s when this idea occurred to me. Without the clear glass layer to react to the color layer the specter of incompatibility disappears, or at least slinks around the corner wearing a fedora. Much experimentation then occurred fusing the ‘chips’ into shapes, ultimately into these five inch+ discs. I am now so absolutely grateful that the first marbles didn’t work because I would never have explored this idea if I had been successful in the first place. Classic ‘One door opens when another shuts’. Once I started arranging all the pieces I could see what a historical assemblage of my ‘greatest hits’ it was. What was before me was a retrospective of my silhouette murrini. Some of the first early Noble Effort signatures and murrini, my own signatures from the last century, experimental murrini left by the wayside, and years of silhouettes were all present. That’s when the realization that what I had on my hands was truly a miniature retrospective show of my past accomplishments in murrini making. I have been ‘fine tuning’ the process of putting these displays together and now am adding certain pieces/murrini to make sure every ‘RetRoSpective’ has certain important murrini represented. This includes murrini [or parts thereof] from my most well known marbles including the ‘Man who Would not be King’ and my ‘Valentine’ in the permanent collection of the Corning Museum of Glass, the ‘Flyball’, ‘Really Free Willy’, the Penguin, and many more. Collectors will now have a direct connection to these pieces because they will have murrini from the same cane these pieces were made of. The frame is a very nice custom ‘Made in America’ black 8” x 9” wood frame that can be hung on the wall or placed on a shelf or table since they are also ’easel back frames’. The murrini ’disk’ is surrounded by black velveteen material under glass. This is a true RetRoSpective of many of my best murrini accomplishments over the years and is the only way possible to have so many of my silhouettes in one piece. Although I make sure certain murrini are present in each one they are all completely unique. Please greatly enlarge the image and look carefully at the details. There are layers to this. It is not just one layer of murrini. It is really difficult to capture this feature in my images so ‘zero in’ on several parts of the images to try to see these details. It also might helpful to visualize the scale/impact of this piece by either drawing a 5.5” circle on a piece of paper, blowing it up to 5.5” on your screen, or looking at something that is that diameter. The size of the frame is about 9” x 10”."