By Melanie McGee Bianchi
Photos By Steve Mann
Landscape painters will often say that they are "drawn to light," but for lamp maker Rick Melby it’s more than an attraction. Light, and its handmaiden, glass, is his medium and means of expression. And as ethereal as his materials may be, there is a sturdiness of vision that controls even the most whimsical of his glass wall sconces, chandeliers and sculptures.
Ethereal or not, glass is hard, in every way. It is unpredictable and (literally) explosive. Perhaps no artistic process is riskier than the blowing and shaping of glass, which requires furnace temperatures of over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. "It’s hot, it’s messy, it creates a lot of debris," says Melby. Plus, of course, it breaks. And broken projects can only be salvaged part of the time. Hard work shattered in the eleventh hour can be devastating. Melby recalls a complex job that he lost in its final stages: "I wanted to jump off a cliff."
Still, Melby is willing to take the risks, both artistically and professionally. Leaving Tampa for the creative climate of Asheville in the mid-’90s, he relinquished a thriving business, important contacts and an enviable reputation. But Rick remembers the move as a wolf-in-the-trap time of reckoning. "I was chewing my own arm off to get out of there, even though I didn’t know anybody here," he says.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before the mountains, demographically speaking, came to him. Melby acknowledges that the Asheville-area profile has "changed radically" in the last decade or so. Happily for many artisans, WNC now brims with retirees and professionals who possess both interior-design savvy and disposable income. But it’s the occasional young collector that particularly sparks his interest.
"In this digital age, I think there will be a saturation point where seeking out handcrafted goods may become a reaction against that slicker way of ‘e-life,’" says Melby. "There’s always going to be a desire and a need for the handmade object."
That’s why he makes his lamps at Crucible Glass Works on Lexington Avenue and at his spacious home studio, keeping his small River Arts District space clean for display. He is not always creating for himself; about 75 percent of his lights are commissioned pieces. But as the late folk-music master John Hartford noted, "Style is based on limitations." Melby finds that working within boundaries is a desirable part of his process: "If a client says, ‘just do whatever you want,’ that’s the kiss of death."
Still, there’s something robustly personal about his Rebus #11 (Reddy’s Reddy), one of two Pop Art-inspired grid sconces that feature kitschy depictions of ‘50s and ‘60s cartoon characters and commercial icons. Another pair of works involves his transformation of scary-looking, discarded farm tools into objects less utilitarian, but decidedly more interesting: Rake boasts a blown-glass handle patterned like a retro highball tumbler, and Auger has been rehabbed with stout glass spikes.
Reverie, a string of plate-glass autumn leaves, turns toward elegance, as do the 20 etched wall sconces illuminating the halls of Asheville’s Kress Building condos — one of the artist’s most important commercial installations. Melby displays another lovely series on the back wall of his studio: tiny, porthole-studded pink and yellow sconces formed from pieces of Haitian glass. He bought the material in South Florida and later discovered it was originally intended for use in Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s palace in Port-au-Prince.Not every piece of glass comes bearing such a glamorous pedigree. But regardless of whether he knows his material’s provenance, Melby gains his artistic footing through raw process. “Often it is during the making of the work that new ideas come about, so I take my time and try to pay attention,” he says. “The finished work is often secondary to the path that is taken.”
And that path “always starts with a beautiful piece of glass,” he acknowledges. Broken down, resurrected and shaped anew, paired with wood or inset in metal, the transformed object achieves what Melby calls an “expanded functionality.”
Ultimately, it’s the multi-dimensional quality of Melby’s work that has been drawing an enthusiastic clientele: the aesthetics, the function and, perhaps, something far more primal — the light.
Pressed to analyze his own attraction to it, the artist goes back a few eons, to the taming of fire. “There’s something hardwired in us to be attuned to a flickering presence,” he says.
