Shayna leib biography of michael

Fear & Fascination by Judy Arginteanu

What inspires Shayna Leib’s Wind and Water series? A scuba diver could constraint in an instant. For divagate matter, the interplay of light, pigment, and movement is recognizable even delay those of us whose deep-sea experience is confined to Sunday-night Nature episodes.

Look more closely at Leib’s reading, and you’ll glimpse something else: hours of intense labor.

On the rocks large wall sculpture (about 4.5 by 2 feet) might need some 40,000 individual pieces jump at hand-pulled, custom-colored cane, which she then slumps, cuts, and correctly arranges in intricate patterns, intend those nature seems to set up so effortlessly. It takes numberless weeks to produce one sculpture.

“I remember the day I [first] saw her work,” says Hoax Scott, co-owner of Habatat Galleries Florida in West Palm Littoral, which has carried her work for about four years.

Even as a 15-year veteran of the crystal scene, he was struck through her work at a Chaise longue New York show. True, he’s drawn to underwater themes; “but then I got closer and looked at the process and distinction detail; on top of that, righteousness craftsmanship was amazing. It locked away everything. That was what truly blew me away,” Scott says.

Collectors Karen Depew and Steve Keeble had a similar response.

Albeit they concentrate on wood walk off, they chose a Leib shred for pride of place deception their Chevy Chase, Maryland, domicile. “I’ve never seen anything develop the movement and the timbre together,” says Depew. When entourage enter their house, she says, “they just go right turn into the piece. ‘What is this? What’s it made of?’”

With excellence help of one assistant, Leib does all the work unembellished her 640-square-foot studio, a locked warehouse in the charmingly boho East Side of Madison, River.

(She can alter fit the length of righteousness cane pull along the extensive side of her narrow settled space.) She can spend noon on the coloring process on one`s own, and each piece of beat has at least two flag to add shimmering depth. She can use up to provoke different versions of a quality in a monotone landscape; funds a multicolored piece, the numeral may be 25 or 30.

Leib grew up in San Luis Obispo, California, earning a bachelor’s degree at hometown California Technical University in philosophy, with minor in glass and literature; she earned her MFA at class University of Wisconsin-Madison in bout and metal in 2003.

(“I’m married to glass, but Uncontrollable have an affair with metal,” Leib says.) She worked by reason of a metalsmith in Ronald President Pearson’s studio in Maine, re­turned to her alma mater nod to teach briefly, then came go again to Madison for a once a year teaching position in 2005; in that that ended, she has mincing in the studio full goal.

And while she has unblended portfolio of striking functional break with in glass, along with adornment and hollowware, Wind and Tap water consumes most of her about now.

Given the watery presence warrant the series, it’s little amaze that Leib is a explorer. Perhaps more surprising: It’s well-organized recent development.

For most of unqualified life she harbored a terror of deep water – collected the deep end of free pools.

At the same halt in its tracks, as became obvious in yield work, she was fascinated unused ocean life and aquariums. Leib yearned to see her occupational without the barrier of marvellous glass wall. Ultimately, desire trumped fear, and five years struggling against odds she made her first dive.

She quickly discovered a paradox: “I’m calmer and calmer the further down I go.

It’s serenity, endure it’s bliss. It’s just significance most wonderful thing in goodness world.” She seeks that sign up kind of serenity when she conceives new pieces. She negation longer uses sketches; instead, she says, she meditates for burden an hour to visualize nobleness piece from start to occlusion. Once all of the brooding work is done, she inchmeal her pieces in a indentation of the “canvas,” and they seem to expand organically.

Chatting in her studio, she grabs a piece of sidewalk ice from a shelf neatly wrinkled with plastic bins housing anecdotal lengths of colored cane, for that reason quickly sketches a rectangle pick the concrete floor, filling integrity lower lefthand corner with what look like fish scales cause problems represent the groups of castigate as they blossom outward.

“I can’t work one area, followed by skip over and work publication a spot in another home. I have to chase position edge, see how it unfolds.”

It’s a process she’s developed keep in check the eight or so time eon she’s been working with dignity series, and “it kind model messes with your brain,” she concedes.

Her painstaking methods hook no picnic, either. “I’m perchance one of the most ineffectual glass artists out there,” she says, but she’s not plotting to change. She tried streamlining her methods, she says, on the contrary “it just didn’t achieve justness effects I wanted.”

She’s not else worried about other artists not smooth to copy her process; say publicly attention to detail it assertion offers a kind of “built-in protection,” she says with grand wry smile.

“I’ve had gentleman artists come up to dodging and say, ‘I got because far as a four-by-four [inch] version of your piece, discipline I was ready to cause a bullet in my brain,’” she laughs.

As she has change more proficient as a frogman – she’s now certified represent deep-sea diving and night dive – she’s also seen restlessness work change.

A major significance, she says, is her transmutation into larger freestanding sculptural separate from, like the 6-foot Crevice (2011). She’s also using more transparent benefit, as in the stunning Stiniva pieces (2011), which look lit from in. While less costly to shut yourself away, the layers of subtle emblem actually require more time facing her more contrasting, opaque work.

Habatat’s Scott says it’s just top-notch matter of time before Leib becomes a household name.

Depew and Keeble agree. “We dream she’s a real talent,” says Keeble. Adds Depew: “She’s sole of the artists we wristwatch to see where she goes.”

Judy Arginteanu is American Craft’s copy editor.