About Jack Storms
If you would have asked a 12-year-old Jack Storms what he wanted to do with his life, he’d have paused and then blurted a vague answer, something akin to “I don’t know. Art?” He’d always been good at it. The passion was there — an excess of it, even. Art was his major at school, and after graduation Jack went to Plymouth State University to study art history.
During his junior year at university, Jack found a job working for a glass artist who had been experimenting with a unique technique - combining lead crystal and dichroic glass using a cold-glass process. There was a moment of revelation. There are very few masters able to work with this technique. The process of cutting, grinding and polishing requires high levels of concentration, hard discipline and significant physical strength.
Fascinated by its potential, Jack spent a year learning the ropes of this technique, and then continued with his own experiments. In 2004, he opened his own studio – Storm Works Studio, where in the years that followed, he delved deeper into the process, spending hours upon hours perfecting his skills. As a result of long, painstaking searches for ways to modernize his production cycle, Jack invented a unique cold-working lathe. This was a breakthrough which expanded the borders of modern art.
Dichroic glass is very firm, it consists of multiple ultrathin micro-layers of metals and their oxides which are glued together. It is interesting that initially, this fantastic material was created to be used in optics for satellites and for spacesuit visors. Jack Storms saw an artistic value in this material. Even now, Jack remains the first and most important artist in the world to work with this very complex but noble material.
Each piece takes several months of meticulous work: highly polished pieces of dichroic glass are glued together with epoxy resin so as to give them the right shape, and then the item is covered with lead crystal. A good example is the famous baseball bat which was created specifically for the New York Yankee player Derek Jeter, to mark his achievement of making the 3000 hits list in the history of Major League Baseball. This work contains 3,000 pieces of optic crystal, one for each hit.
Jack Storms’ works are of diverse and sometimes unexpected forms: spheres, cubes and even everyday items, such as champagne glasses or wine bottles. All of them look like perfectly cut precious stones. They refract the beams of light, creating unique optical effects that can look different depending on the viewing angle. It’s no coincidence that fans call Jack “The Lord of the Rainbow”, “The Wizard of Color”, and “The Magician of Optical Illusions”. He takes his audience to a world of dazzling and stunning treasures, to the real cave of Ali Baba, where time disappears in a wonderful illusion.
The Fibonacci ratios, the principles of math in nature which form the growth structure of every living creature, are at the heart of each glass sculpture by Jack Storms. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why his works capture the imagination of viewers and astonish them with a magnificent beauty and harmony of smoothly polished forms. Private collectors, art galleries around the world, and even Hollywood film directors dream of getting their hands on Storms’ works. It is symbolic that two sculptures by Jack Storms were featured in the fantasy film “Guardians of the Galaxy”, which once again proves that the artist’s imagination is forward-looking and infinite.
It was the first time that glass art by Jack Storms has been displayed in Russia, when Surround Art Gallery received the first artwork from the artist. The dream became a reality – these breathtaking masterpieces now fill the mysterious twilight of the Surround Art Gallery with a magical, fabled light.
