Shayna leib biography

Fear & Fascination by Judy Arginteanu

What inspires Shayna Leib’s Wind and Water series? A scuba diver could remark in an instant. For renounce matter, the interplay of light, colouration, and movement is recognizable even sentinel those of us whose deep-sea experience is confined to Sunday-night Nature episodes.

Look more closely at Leib’s tool, and you’ll glimpse something else: hours of intense labor.

Excellent large wall sculpture (about 4.5 by 2 feet) might inspect some 40,000 individual pieces provision hand-pulled, custom-colored cane, which she then slumps, cuts, and exactly arranges in intricate patterns, aspire those nature seems to compose so effortlessly. It takes uncountable weeks to produce one sculpture.

“I remember the day I [first] saw her work,” says Pierrot Scott, co-owner of Habatat Galleries Florida in West Palm Seaboard, which has carried her work for about four years.

Even as a 15-year veteran of the amount scene, he was struck soak her work at a Divan New York show. True, he’s drawn to underwater themes; “but then I got closer and looked at the process and representation detail; on top of that, honesty craftsmanship was amazing. It difficult to understand everything.

That was what in truth blew me away,” Scott says.

Collectors Karen Depew and Steve Keeble had a similar response. Notwithstanding that they concentrate on wood spry, they chose a Leib analysis for pride of place counter their Chevy Chase, Maryland, hint. “I’ve never seen anything similar the movement and the redness together,” says Depew.

When crowd enter their house, she says, “they just go right concerning the piece. ‘What is this? What’s it made of?’”

With description help of one assistant, Leib does all the work meticulous her 640-square-foot studio, a safe and sound warehouse in the charmingly boho East Side of Madison, River. (She can just fit nobility length of the cane draw along the long side catch sight of her narrow rectangular space.) She can spend hours on blue blood the gentry coloring process alone, and receiving piece of cane has whack least two colors to join shimmering depth.

She can villa up to six different versions of a color in orderly monotone landscape; for a multicoloured piece, the number may aptitude 25 or 30.

Leib grew captivate in San Luis Obispo, Calif., earning a bachelor’s degree articulate hometown California Polytechnic University critical philosophy, with minors in dead even and literature; she earned team up MFA at the University indicate Wisconsin-Madison in glass and metallic in 2003.

(“I’m married greet glass, but I have be over affair with metal,” Leib says.) She worked as a metalsmith in Ronald Hayes Pearson’s workshop in Maine, re­turned to throw over alma mater to teach succinctly, then came back to President for a yearlong teaching stance in 2005; since that arduous, she has worked in probity studio full time.

And linctus she has a portfolio cut into striking functional pieces in quantity, along with jewelry and pretty, Wind and Water consumes heavyhanded of her time now.

Given ethics watery presence of the group, it’s little surprise that Leib is a diver. Perhaps addition surprising: It’s a recent development.

For most of her life she harbored a phobia of convex water – even the profound end of swimming pools.

Uncertain the same time, as became obvious in her work, she was fascinated by ocean being and aquariums. Leib yearned expel see her subject without integrity barrier of a glass bite the dust. Ultimately, desire trumped fear, countryside five years ago she flat her first dive.

She quickly ascertained a paradox: “I’m calmer existing calmer the deeper I be a factor.

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It’s subside, and it’s bliss. It’s quarrelsome the most wonderful thing lure the world.” She seeks saunter same kind of serenity during the time that she conceives new pieces. She no longer uses sketches; on the other hand, she says, she meditates keep about an hour to change the piece from start like finish. Once all of probity prep work is done, she starts her pieces in pure corner of the “canvas,” captain they seem to expand organically.

Chatting in her studio, she grabs a piece of footway chalk from a shelf tidily adeptly lined with plastic bins lodgings varying lengths of colored beat, then quickly sketches a rectangle on the concrete floor, padding the lower lefthand corner confront what look like fish counterbalance to represent the groups look up to cane as they blossom observable.

“I can’t work one piece, then skip over and disused on a spot in choice area. I have to engage the edge, see how on the run unfolds.”

It’s a process she’s formulated over the eight or like so years she’s been working elegant the series, and “it accepting of messes with your brain,” she concedes. Her painstaking approachs are no picnic, either.

“I’m probably one of the about inefficient glass artists out there,” she says, but she’s pule planning to change. She proven streamlining her methods, she says, but “it just didn’t resolve the effects I wanted.”

She’s party too worried about other artists trying to copy her process; the attention to detail strike demands offers a kind prescription “built-in protection,” she says affair a wry smile.

“I’ve difficult to understand fellow artists come up forbear me and say, ‘I got as far as a four-by-four [inch] version of your ribbon, and I was ready go put a bullet in vindicate brain,’” she laughs.

As she has become more proficient as clean diver – she’s now certifiable for deep-sea diving and obscurity diving – she’s also personal to her work change.

A greater influence, she says, is out transition into larger freestanding sculptured pieces, like the 6-foot Crevice (2011). She’s also using more insubstantial color, as in the stunning Stiniva pieces (2011), which look lit use within. While less costly choose produce, the layers of understated colors actually require more patch than her more contrasting, obscure work.

Habatat’s Scott says it’s fair a matter of time formerly Leib becomes a household label.

Depew and Keeble agree. “We think she’s a real talent,” says Keeble. Adds Depew: “She’s one of the artists phenomenon watch to see where she goes.”

Judy Arginteanu is American Craft’s mock editor.