Josh Simpson

Glass artist Josh Simpson's vision is as vast as the universe, an unlimited landscape that stretches from the hypnotic mysteries of the ocean to the far reaches of space. Since he began to explore the secrets of his ancient craft nearly 30 years ago, Simpson has created a life and persona every bit as fantastic as his remarkable, distinctive work.

"I can't say that I had a detailed life plan when I first was captivated by glass blowing, or had any notion of where it would take me," Simpson laughs. "Even now, I never know quite where I'm going until I look back and see the progress. It's kind of the ant theory of life, bumbling along until I hit a rock, then I climb over it, or back up and go around. The method has worked, however."

Self-taught, Simpson took a break from college to pursue a mythic dream of glassblowing. Using his life savings, which totaled $306.00, he rented an isolated tract of land in Vermont, hand built a studio from salvaged lumber, sewed himself a 12-foot cloth teepee to live in, and set about trying to crack the closely guarded secret of iridescent Tiffany glass. He succeeded, and then moved on to new artistic challenges. In the process, he developed a reputation as one of the foremost contemporary glassblowers in America.

By the late 1970s, Simpson's work was so well regarded that then-First Lady Rosalynn Carter borrowed a set of his goblets for a White House luncheon. Twenty years later, Hilary Rodham Clinton purchased some of the artist's work for the White House. Today Josh Simpson is something of a celebrity, the focus of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as a public television documentary.

Simpson's rich and complex glass creations have been featured in major exhibitions across the globe and are included in permanent collections at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, among others.

Simpson works out of a post-and-beam barn in the bucolic Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, but his artistic vision is inspired by his fascination with space and technology and the celestial richness of the night sky.

Although his work ranges from functional to the purely sculptural, in recent years Simpson has become particularly well known for his Planets. This evolving series suggests intricately detailed miniature worlds, reminiscent of the rounded shape of the Earth as photographed by NASA from space. Originally developed to stir the interest of school children, these glass creations present fantastic landscapes that evoke dreams of inhabited worlds in space, or of underwater kingdoms, complete with continents and clouds, coral reefs and streaking meteors.

As an extension of the vision expressed in Planets, Simpson developed Megaworlds, a series of large, heavy glass sculptures. To create a Megaworld, Simpson must direct his production team in a precise, carefully choreographed collaborative effort.

If Simpson's imaginings about space and the nature of the universe ever grow dim or labored, he can turn to his wife for fresh, firsthand inspiration. In one of those quirky, life-imitates-art serendipities, Simpson is married to Cady Coleman, an astronaut. As a cosmic couple, the scientist and the artist respect each other's work tremendously, but turn their passion for the worlds beyond Earth's atmosphere towards different ends. "He makes planets; I want to go to them. I want to be part of getting us out there," Coleman explained in a Boston Globe article last year.

SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY
Sphere Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague, Czech Republic
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA