About my works

Glassware

‘Kiln ready’ glass
When the glass has taken its final form and there is no subsequent elaboration of it. The tear on the bottom, the so called ‘navel’ shows that it does not have a ground mouth?

Freely blown glass, ‘new mediaeval’
Mediaeval glass was for the most part not blown into a shape, but created freely.

Bottles and glasses blown into a shape
In the case of glasses, the stems and foot were not separately attached glass pieces, but were blown together with the body, which is cut off during blowing with the closing of the wooden mould. It is characteristic of certain pieces that the foot is not blown but, blown together with the rest. This technique lasted longer in Hungary than elsewhere in Europe between the two world wars.

Bottles for wine-bins
There was a blank window in wine cellars, containing the case, the chest and in the chest the … bottles filled with wine. These are the wine-bins.

Mural

Stained glass
The pieces of glass cut to measure are laid between lead rails and the ends of the rails are soldered together. The character of the represented image is mainly determine by the contour../outlining? originating in the technology. It can consist of coloured bottles or motifs and scenes painted onto the moulds.

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Rippl-Rónay’s glass

The painter József Rippl-Rónai was born on May 23rd, 1861 in Kaposvár, Hungary. He lived and worked in Paris for nearly fifteen years. He had close ties with the Nabis group and French art nouveau artists. József Rippl-Rónai is among the few Hungarian artists who is as well known and respected abroead as he deserves to be, not just for the years spent in Paris but primarily for his pictures. He needs no introduction as a painter but he does as an applied/industrial artist. Inspired by the Art Nouveau way of looking at things, he worked in the most various fields of applied arts with an approach far ahead of his time. One of his greatest challenges was the so-called Andrássy dining room which is one of the most outstanding creations of turn of the century art/‘gesamtkunstwerk’. His versatile/many-layered work can only be reconstructed from the fragments remaining. However his glass designs of 1899 were not executed. These were also made for Count Tivadar Andrássy and Rónai intended them for the collection of functional objects. Line drawings and designs for glasses and caarafes. They are extremely simple, so we can boldly say they predated Art Deco by twenty years. The series consisting of ten pieces was designed according to the Viennese mode of laying a table: five goblets/glasses (for Bordeaux, Rhine wine, Tokay, Malaga wine and champagne, two glasses (for beer and water), a finger bowl, a water jug and a carafe for Bordeaux. Besides the drawings Rónai only wrote instructions. To think/take them a step further and to execute them was a beautiful but serious task. The effect they have today in our modern, chaotic world is especially interesting though these simple, clean shapes were designed more than a hundred years ago. Though they were never made, they survived the twentieth century, as if sleeping through it and are now more contemporary ‘than they would once have been’. The kiln ready technique (when the object acquires its final form in the heat of the kiln) is interesting here too and now when I am ‘remaking’ them (though Rónai was probably thinking of glasses with polished mouths, because on these simple forms it is the burned mouths of the glass that ‘shows the craft’, thus they evoke the past precisely to the extent that Rónai was innovative at the time at the turn of the century in the character of forms. At that time the craft/trade technique was still alive though it was slowly being excluded by the mass production of polished glass. Uncle Piacsek is drinking out of just such a glasses in Rónai’s pictures of the kind that are only seen in museum today. Kiln glass can only be developed with care and attention, the traces of the craft on the object are ‘irregular’. It was this object making behaviour that interested me and interest me. This is how it came about that the simple line drawings became not polished mough glasses but ‘breathing’ kiln glasses. The bent glasses match the decorative glass made in Rónai’s lifetime (top picture), to put next to the freshly cut flower on the table, fashioned to Rónai’s liking too I hope.