Daniel Clayman

Art Brokerage: Daniel Clayman American Glass Artist: b. 1957. Daniel Clayman was born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1957. Daniel Clayman is a product of the studio glass movement. Before beginning his training as a glass artist, Clayman worked as a theater lighting designer. His early life theatre experience clearly bore fruit in his later work as a glass sculptor, which has consistently revolved around the effects of light and shade on the objects themselves and on their surroundings. After earning a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1986, Clayman set up his studio near Providence, Rhode Island, where he has been working since. In the 1990s Clayman based his sculptures on organic forms. His Pods, for example, containing pale colored glass inside, but sheathed in bronze on the outside, resembled plants. Their cavities sparked an intriguing play of light and shade. The artist has since changed his formal vocabulary radically, embracing geometry and abstraction. His work now features pyramidal shapes, cylinders and rings, some of them more than one meter high. Color has receded into the background: the sculptures are dominated by a semi-opaque white that appears in broken shades. Clayman displays his sculptures effectively, spotlighting them in dark surroundings, as though they are on stage. Critics have previously detected in his work the influence of sculptors like Constantin Brancusi and Tony Cragg. In his hands glass certainly becomes a sculptural material equal in rank to stone, wood and metal. Listings wanted.