Richard Marquis
| Richard Marquis | |
|---|---|
| Born |
17 September 1945 Bumble Bee, Arizona |
| Education | B.A., M.A., University of California, Berkeley |
| Known for | glass: murrine forms, notably teapots |
| Website | www |
Richard "Dick" Marquis (born 1945) is an American studio glass artist. One of the first Americans ever to work in a Venetian glass factory, he became a master of Venetian cane and murrine techniques. He is considered a pioneer of American contemporary glass art, and is noted for his quirky, playful work that incorporates flawless technique and underlying seriousness about form and color.
Richard Marquis was born on September 17, 1945, in Bumble Bee, Arizona, the second son of an itinerant grocery-store worker and a ceramics-hobbying mother. Marquis and his older brother were the first persons in his parents' families to finish high school, and he was the first to attend college. As a child he began a life-long absorption with collecting found and scavenged objects in categories (cigar bands, bottle caps), though the collections disappeared each time the family moved. He also engaged in building hobby models.
Because of disagreements with his father, Marquis left home at fifteen, though he remained in his Southern California high school, where he developed an interest in ceramics. In 1963 he moved to the San Francisco area and began architecture studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He became more and more interested in ceramics, studying with Peter Voulkos and Ron Nagle. His quirky style was influenced by the funky environment surrounding Voulkos and the other Berkeley ceramicists of the time. After Marvin Lipofsky began a glass program at Berkeley in 1964, Marquis was attracted to glass, and by 1967 he had established his own studio. He earned his BA degree at Berkeley in 1969.
In 1969, Marquis was awarded a Fulbright-Hays fellowship to work on Murano, in Venice, Italy. Given the title of guest designer in the Venini factory, he worked his way through the glassblowing line, watching the masters, making drawings, and then doing it himself. As he mastered the murrine techniques, Marquis realized he could use them to make objects with colorful patterns, and even to embed lettered words in blown objects. Many of his early objects, inspired by his Berkeley free-speech-movement days, were shaped like oversized recreational drug capsules, and included American flags, hammer-and-sickle symbols, and four-letter f-bombs.
Returning to the US in 1970, Marquis taught for a year at the University of Washington, then returned to Berkeley to earn his M.A. in glass in 1972. His thesis was on the making of murrine and their use, and for his exhibition he made two canes that could be cut into murrine: one of the American flag, and the second a remarkable and complex word-cane of the entire Lord's Prayer. Murrine cane can be stretched out to any desired diameter, so that the wording in the prayer can be easily readable, or reduced to the size of a pinhead. For several years, Marquis included Lord's Prayer murrine of various sizes in his work.
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