Paul Stankard, a visionary glass blower who memorialized flora and fauna in hardened and translucent form, died at the age of 83, according to a New York Times obituary that celebrates how his “decades-long obsession with replicating the natural world in glass transformed the American paperweight from tchotchke to fine art.” The cause of his death was cancer, according to his daughter.
As the Times described Stankard’s fateful turn to the the mode of working he made his own, “In 1972, with three young children and a newborn at home, Mr. Stankard skipped out on a steady job blowing glass for chemical laboratories. He was in love—with paperweights.”
As Stankard himself stated, on his website, “What Walt Whitman did with words, I seek to do in glass on a visual level. My passion is to articulate fresh information celebrating nature through glass art. My work is driven by a respect for living things and truth to the organic mysteries of the plant kingdom.”
Stankard was born in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, in 1943 and enrolled in 1961 in a glassblowing program at Salem County Vocational Technical Institute. Eleven years later, he “left industry to pursue his dream of being creative in glass fulltime,” according to his own bio.
The work he made after earned plaudits beyond the world of glass and landed in the collections of institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
“Within three-inch hemispheres,” the Times obituary reads, “he created spectacular, increasingly intricate natural worlds from glass: root systems, worms, moths and honeybees in flight; kaleidoscopically colored bouquets crammed with foxglove, moss, blueberries and sprites.”
David Graeber, Stankard’s longtime studio assistant, told the Times, “Paul just loved glass. He lived it, breathed it, ate it.”