Drawings and Glass Sculptures

My interest in the collaborative process lies primarily in the opportunity it affords me to test my artistic voice and question the vocabulary I have been building as "abstraction language."

Through the interaction of the glass collaboration I am forced to consider forms and colors that I ordinarily would not bring into play in the construction of my images. These elements are joined with and become part of the drawings I construct on the pasteralli. The result has often been startling to me and consequently raise new questions for me to ask myself both in the process of constructing the next glass vessel in the hot shop and back in my studio when making other art with the materials I am accustomed to using.

Working with an artist of the caliber of Toots Zynsky, whose focus is so acute and intense and the excellent craftsman blowers that I have been fortunate to be working with, forces me to rethink moves which can often be taken for granted or assumed in the construction of an image. It is this questioning that causes artistic inquiry to push beyond what is known in order to find the point of resistance at which meaningful images are created. It heightens one's sense of the "formal" in the construction of an image, i.e. structure, shape, form, and space and opens the door through which the creative mind must pass in order to abandon what is known and invent new idioms in the development of artistic language.

There is something truly magical that occurs when one is involved in the making of an object that is constantly in flux, that does not finally reveal itself until the aneiler doors are opened and you are confronted with an object that was conceived by the interaction of two independent and strong wills that have mysteriously come together and begin to work as one, that my hands touch only minimally at the beginning of the physical portion of the creative process, and that you must try to glimpse in a distorted form before it is taken away and concealed in the darkness of the aneiler, still glowing like molten volcanic lava.

The more I mature as an artist, the greater my need to disassociate myself from a conscious interaction with process. Collaborating on the creation of objects and images that by necessity of process, remove me from interacting with materials in a "hands on" manner, and that connects me to the historic tradition of collaboration, suits my creative needs. The glass collaboration structures a situation in which I am insulated from the seductive nature of material used and I am able to objectively explore material as a means to the further conceptualization and development of my ideas while being involved with a form of creation that I could and would not ordinarily be engaged in.

Alfred DeCredico I 2.22.96