The Beauty of Decay

Decay is beautiful.

The mundance – gorgeous.

Tragedy is fragile.

Josh Cole, director of The Crefeld School Glass Studio in Chestnut Hill, has brought his show “I’m Still Here” to

He’ll be there until Feb. 19.

The Kalamazoo, Michigan-born Cole earned a bachelor’s in fine art from The Cleveland Institute of Art. He went on to attend Tyler School of Art at Temple University, earning a master’s in glass in 2007. He has been with The Crefeld School since 2008.

Cole works in the medium of glass, specifically in a Venetian style. He is drawn to its connection with royalty, tradition and role in Catholicism.

His work is a range of beauty, delicacy and emotion.

His most recent pieces are more opaque – a dead bird on a sofa in brown glass, the eponymous piece in his show; his self portrait cast in wax and transitioned to cast led crystal; a tribute called “The Day the Music Died” in blue cast glass with a plane crashed into a mountain – but they still hold the emotion of his earlier pieces.

These earlier pieces look delicate, cast in white hot sculpted glass and shaped into everyday objects like coffee mugs and goblets.

“The show relates to the idea of glorifying the things we don’t look at or pay attention to,” Cole said. “I’m looking at things we may not find beautiful and make them beautiful.”

A lot of Cole’s pieces include glass flowers and glass birds, positioned in hands or in cups or on mountains.

“Birds are a nice symbol of something that can fly, but also tragic when it falls,” Cole said. “A flower is beautiful, but it isn’t free of death. A flower is something soft, and especially when you use glass, which is such a hard, crisp medium, to do something like a glass flower is a nice contrast.”

The items like the blown traveler’s mugs and blown coffee mugs are replicated from Cole looking at an actual cup and creating it as such.

The more opaque pieces, such as “The Day the Music Died” and “Garden Party” – the latter being a tribute to Ricky Nelson – hold on to that feeling of tragedy.

The opaque pieces, Cole said, cause the symbols to be transformed in a different way than transparent glass.

One piece that catches the eye is called “Memories”: an arm lays in a basket of glass flowers and morphs into two hands. In those hands, a pile of flowers.

Cole admitted he has not thought about that piece in a while.

“It’s about letting go,” he said. “The bird’s not there. It’s one arm holding something with two hands. It’s odd and different. It’s about losing something, hence flowers and no bird.”

Cole talked about how his work has evolved over the years, from transparent glass to the more opaque style.

He sees himself as a traditional glass blower who transitioned to sculpting solid pieces. Currently, he is leaning away from the Venetian style and worked with wax cast into glass.

“I feel more like a sculptor and less of a glass artist,” he said.

Cole loved the show at the gallery run by Aaron Wiener. He said the white walls make it rough to see everything in his pieces, but he likes the subtlety of that.

“It’s about looking for beauty in the mundane,” he said.

Wiener said Cole’s show has gotten a mixed reaction from people, calling it a “push-pull situation.”

“They are both attracted and pushed away. It’s very, very crisp work, very, very intellectual and emotional work that draws you in, but people are fearing the delicacy of the work – it makes them back off a bit,” Wiener said.

Wiener believed much of Cole’s work draws from “cookie cutter Americana,” as in he elevates things that are throw away and mundane into beauty and elegance.

“He is changing how people respond to everyday objects and simple life,” he said. “I’ve talked to Josh about people who are risk takers in the world and who are lost to us when you look at pilots and astronauts, when they take enormous risks to broaden a perspective. The work is emotional and it looks at transition.”

Something like dead birds, for instance, is about that image of transition and going from life to death and moving on. Cole is not demystifying it, but he’s not making it an ugly experience either.

The piece called “The Day the Music Died” looks at loss and, in terms, of what they brought to our culture and the passing of them.

“How do we start and become important and an icon and go beyond that even after we are long gone?” Wiener said. “We are part of a dialogue that is a history of us as a people. He is picking things to make people think about this transition.”

Both Wiener and Cole work in the medium of glass, a medium that is a relatively new form of expression. Its traditions are rooted in European style, but as a material, glass has been used since about the 1960s, Wiener said.

Cole was trained and taught by the generation Wiener was with when he learned glass. Those teachers, in turn, were taught by the original 1960s generation and were more explorative.

Wiener said with glass, you attempt to do everything and hold back nothing.

“Josh came to glass at time when a lot of technique was being taught, and without technique, they couldn’t express themselves. Josh became the next person to hold the torch,” Wiener said. “Technique allows you to talk to the audience, to control glass, to meet an image you see in your head. It is a material that has become a challenge – do not hold back and test all opportunities and options. Don’t worry about it if it breaks, and keep moving forward.”

Most importantly, glass is a medium that can emulate anything – steel, wood, stone and water.

“It allows for a lot of options that other materials don’t, and it is attractive that way,” he said. “It gives you a wider range in visual vocabulary.”