Marty White Elk Holmes

Striving for graceful shapes and soothing color combinations, Marty White Elk Holmes uses transparent, translucent and opaque colors with clear crystal. His original designs are clearly influenced by organic forms. Some pieces are decorated with floral or abstract motifs, while others are simple statements of contour and color.

Pieces in his series of Rose Perfume Vials suggest an emerging bud, executed in opaque colors with a green base or transparent jewel tones with a clear crystal base.

His series of Rainbow vases, bowls and ornaments features a full spectrum of colored glass fragments which Marty applies to a clear crystal background. A swirling array of predominantly blue colored fragments distinguishes his Spectrum Series of eggs and paperweights. Marty blows each piece freely, without the use of molds, primarily from glass he has formulated and made himself. A technical purist, he does no cutting or grinding even on his paperweights, preferring the more difficult option of finishing each piece hot and cracking it off the blowpipe.

Using traditional glassblowing methods that are thousands of years old, he creates each piece at the end of a five-foot long metal blowpipe, working the glass at temperatures in excess of 2300 degrees F. He achieves a lively color palette using formulations of various metallic oxides and rare earth elements -- such as cobalt, gold, copper and others -- mixed into the molten glass.

White Elk is how he signs his pieces, which are also dated.

Intrigued by how color affects human psychological behavior, White Elk Holmes has studied art since the 1970s, and has worked in glass since 1988. He began doing his own original designs in glass in 1994 and, assisted by his wife Jo, maintains a studio in a remote area of Colorado. His young son Nokoi (Black Foot for "my son") is already showing an intense interest in the glass objects his father creates.

The glass art of White Elk has been shown at galleries and juried exhibitions throughout the United States and is included in numerous private collections.