Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently Read Online Free

Defense Forces and perhaps the last public figure to wear an eye patch, has anyone made it stylish. The most renowned eye patch wearers remain fictional characters: Bazooka Joe, Rooster Cogburn, Snake Plissken. But there it is, stuck to Chihuly’s fleshy face, like a badge of honor. He adjusts it with surprising frequency, seemingly uncomfortable with it even after thirty years. Maybeit’s all for show. It makes no difference. The loss of sight in his eye was a defining moment for Chihuly in terms of both his art and his career. Certainly, it changed his perception. It also made him into an iconoclast.
    A Different Perspective
     
    Chihuly does not spend much time in the hotshop. Sometimes he goes in to direct his team, but mostly he conveys his visions through paintings splashed on large pieces of butcher paper. Several paintings, each of which fetches several thousand dollars for an original, are tacked to the walls above the furnaces. Some paintings are simply splashes of color in an unusual shape. Spirals and other organic forms are in abundance. Other paintings clearly convey a particular piece. One painting of a black vase is similar in form and color to the one being blown, but instead of gold feathers, it sprouts a psychedelic version of the Medusa’s head, with tangerine-colored snakes.
    Although the team approach to glassblowing has been known to the Europeans for centuries, Chihuly didn’t really put it into full-blown action until an accident gave him no choice. While he was touring Great Britain in 1976, Chihuly’s car crashed, sending the artist through the windshield. The damage to his left eye was irreparable, and he has not had vision out of it ever since. Even while recovering from the accident, he continued to blow glass, at least until another accident sidelined him more or less for good.
    “I always felt handicapped after I had my accident. I didn’t have any peripheral vision, which was kind of hard because you are close together. And I didn’t have any depth perception,” Chihuly says:
    About a year after the accident, I went to see a friend in La Jolla for a couple of days, and I dislocated my right arm in the surf. That made it impossible to work in the hotshop. During all that time, while I was recovering, I still worked, but it was the other guy, BillyMorris, who took over as the main guy, the gaffer. From that point on I could see the advantages of not being the gaffer. Because if you have 10 people out there, and sometimes we have 15, you can watch everything that’s going on. You can talk to the guy doing the coloring, and somebody else if you want to make it bigger or speed it up. A lot of those decisions are made on the other side of the shop, not where the gaffer is. I think that made me a lot more creative and perhaps do a lot more work than other people could. It’s very tiring to be the gaffer. 1
     
    Chihuly’s story is striking because he did not become an iconoclast until he lost his eye. Although he was not consciously aware of it at the time, in retrospect even a casual observer of Chihuly’s work can see a marked change after the accident. In 1975, Chihuly was working and teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He had established the glass department at RISD five years earlier and, in collaboration with James Carpenter, created some of the first glass installations. Chihuly spent his summers back in Washington teaching at the ecohippie glass school that he founded in Pilchuck. But at RISD, Chihuly was attempting to merge designs from Navajo blankets into glass sculpture. The glass forms were rather unremarkable, cylinders that looked like candle holders. Chihuly, however, had just learned a technique for transferring drawings into glass. He made small paintings that incorporated Navajo designs, and laid them flat on the marvering table. Taking the molten glass cylinders, he would roll the cylinders on top of the paintings until the glass picked up the design.