Tlingit heritage helps glass artist Preston Singletary break new ground

The way Preston Singletary tells it, he didn't find his way into glass art.

Glass art found its way into him.

Singletary, who grew up in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood, had his heart set on being a musician when he was in his teens. But glassmaking, his "day job" as he saw it, turned out to be his true calling.

Take a look at "Echoes, Fire, and Shadows," his retrospective show at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, and the idea that glassmaking was a fallback career for the 46-year-old becomes a little dumbfounding.

Even his apprentice work is exquisite. He may have been trying to find his voice with such finely crafted pieces as "Alligator Goblet" (1999) and the two siren-mouthed vases of "Untitled" (1996). But they're pleasures to behold.

Still, it was through his work inspired by Tlingit design that Singletary — whose mother is half-Tlingit, half-Filipina — came into his own.

Singletary's first piece to draw on Northwest Coast art design, "Wolf Hat," dates back to 1989. It predicted things to come.

But it wasn't until a decade later that Singletary fully immersed himself in his Tlingit heritage, translating traditional tribal objects (amulets, rattles, hats, masks, storage boxes) and figures of tribal legend (eagles, ravens, wolves, whales) into a most unlikely medium: blown and "sandcarved" glass.

Glass that doesn't look like glass. Glass that "acts" like wood or stone or bones. Glass that covers territory glass has never covered before.

In the hot shop

A chilly late October rain rattles down on the corrugated plastic roof of the open-air hot shop at Benjamin Moore Inc. (BMI) in Seattle's International District. But the heat thrown off by the furnaces keeps the working floor toasty.

Singletary has booked three days at BMI to work on a new series of glass sculptures based on a Tlingit rattle design. Each piece, with its multiple components joined together, depicts a bird carrying figures on its back.

Singletary mans the oxygen-propane tank, its nozzle issuing a blue-white spike of flame that he uses to "spot heat" the bird's body in the places where two little human figures will be attached. Under the flame, the dark glass turns electric-stovetop orange.

Assistant Sean O'Neill brings over smaller components, kept hot in a separate kiln, that Singletary fuses onto the bird's back.

In the meantime, Joe Benvenuto bathes the whole sculpture in a broader yellow flame to keep the heat even. Every couple of minutes Erich Woll carefully returns the bird on its "punty" (holding rod) to the fiery "glory hole" to bring its overall temperature up and keep the glass more workable.

Sean Albert hovers nearby with two wooden paddles to shield Singletary from the heat.

Singletary himself is a former hot-shop assistant. He literally grew up in Benjamin Moore, back when it was Glass Eye Studio. After Moore took the premises over in 1985, Singletary worked there with Dale Chihuly, Dan Dailey and other masters of the art.

After the last components of the rattle are fused, O'Neill, wearing Kevlar gloves, stands ready to catch the piece as Singletary, sprinkling water on its stem, cools it enough to separate it from the holding rod with a light tap.

Singletary calls BMI the "pinnacle" of hot shops. "There's so much history that's happened here that the teams that work here are top-of-the-line."

Indeed, Albert, Benvenuto, O'Neill and Woll are all glass artists in their own right.

The beginning

Singletary saw his first glass art when he was 15, thanks to an energetic California teenager, Dante Marioni, who'd just moved into the neighborhood. Dante's father, glass artist Paul Marioni, had a studio in the old Melrose Exchange Building in Wallingford.

There, Paul Marioni showed the youngsters "The Boxers," an elaborate cast-glass panel he was working on. Singletary didn't see any glassblowing that day, but a couple of years later he accompanied Dante Marioni to Glass Eye Studio.

Singletary later got a job there, first as a night watchman, then as an assistant.

"At that time there weren't very many glass people in the Northwest," he recalls. "So they grabbed a handful of us kids, through Dante's connections. And we all started to work with glass."

Not that glass was the sole focus of Singletary's life: "I always had this pipe dream that I would be a musician. ... I was pretty serious about it for a long time."

He played bass for Rumors of the Big Wave and, later, the funk-rock band Ironing Pants Definitely, which he co-founded. When Seattle's grunge explosion happened, Singletary's band got "eclipsed."

All the while, Singletary had been serving his apprenticeship as a glass artist, making paperweights, eggs, Christmas balls and vases.

"Wolf Hat" and beyond

When Moore took over Glass Eye, the work became more creative. Singletary began to make pieces of his own, in a variety of styles, including "Wolf Hat," with its design copied from a book by Bill Holm. But he hadn't fully settled on his style yet.

In 1993, he went to Sweden for six months. There he met his future wife, Åsa Sandlund. They married in 1995 and settled in Seattle, where they live with their three children.

It was at this point Singletary grew more single-minded about exploring Northwest Coast art motifs. He wasn't well-versed in the Tlingit heritage of his mother's family and had some catching up to do.

After a phase of copying traditional Northwest Coast designs, Singletary started putting his own stamp on Tlingit-inspired ovoids and U-forms (known as "formlines"). And he grew more experimental.

"Black Gold," a 2008 piece in the Museum of Glass show, is a case in point. It has traditional Tlingit formlines on one side and more organic bas-relief detail on the other — a map, perhaps, of the Southeast Alaskan archipelago?

"I was trying to create the texture of barnacle growth you might find on the back of a mussel shell," Singletary explains.

Another departure from tradition has been Singletary's move into mono-colored design. The translucent gold of his "Bentwood Box" or ruddy rhubarb hues of his "Tlingit Storage Box" (on display at the Burke Museum) are two examples where he's sidestepped the traditional Tlingit black-white-red color scheme.

White-hot career

With the show at the Museum of Glass and a beautiful career-retrospective coffee-table-book catalog to go with it, Singletary is clearly hitting a career peak.

Earlier this year, he took over Sonja Blomdahl's South Lake Union studio, where he and his team fire smaller pieces and do all their sandcarving (see accompanying story). For larger pieces, he routinely uses Moore's studio and its pool of glassmaking talents.

There's a huge glass community here, he says, drawn from around the globe to Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, where Singletary trained and now teaches. "They found that the Northwest was a comfortable place to work because it never gets too hot here."

He isn't sure what he missed by not attending college or art school: "I don't know if I was preserved or ruined by it. In a way, it left me open to thinking about things in my own way. I wasn't really that good in school in the first place."

While he jokes he'll have a hard time explaining that to his children, he does think there are other ways of achieving the same goal. "I was really fortunate to learn through practical experience."

As for the sidewinding path that led him to explore Northwest Coast design in such an unlikely medium, Singletary sees it as a kind of destiny:

"I think it brings another dimension to indigenous art. So I've found that's sort of my role. I didn't choose that in the very beginning. But it chose me to some degree. It gives my life a sense of purpose, after all these years. Finally, I have something."

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com