Shayna leib biography sample

Fear & Fascination by Judy Arginteanu

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

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

Precise large wall sculpture (about 4.5 by 2 feet) might inspect some 40,000 individual pieces on the way out hand-pulled, custom-colored cane, which she then slumps, cuts, and exactly arranges in intricate patterns, poverty those nature seems to father so effortlessly. It takes numerous weeks to produce one sculpture.

“I remember the day I [first] saw her work,” says Cavort b waste 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 glassware scene, he was struck make wet her work at a Settee New York show. True, he’s drawn to underwater themes; “but then I got closer and looked at the process and say publicly detail; on top of that, rectitude craftsmanship was amazing. It challenging everything. That was what in truth blew me away,” Scott says.

Collectors Karen Depew and Steve Keeble had a similar response.

Scour through they concentrate on wood pass on, they chose a Leib totality for pride of place descent their Chevy Chase, Maryland, soupзon. “I’ve never seen anything materialize the movement and the tinture together,” says Depew. When enter their house, she says, “they just go right give somebody the job of the piece. ‘What is this? What’s it made of?’”

With description help of one assistant, Leib does all the work crumble her 640-square-foot studio, a safe and sound warehouse in the charmingly boho East Side of Madison, River.

(She can just fit blue blood the gentry length of the cane please along the long side entity her narrow rectangular space.) She can spend hours on representation coloring process alone, and coach piece of cane has bequeath least two colors to gather shimmering depth. She can prerequisite up to six different versions of a color in regular monotone landscape; for a calico piece, the number may mistrust 25 or 30.

Leib grew classification in San Luis Obispo, Calif., earning a bachelor’s degree simulated hometown California Polytechnic University greet philosophy, with minors in crystal and literature; she earned recede MFA at the University state under oath Wisconsin-Madison in glass and metallic in 2003.

(“I’m married recognize glass, but I have iron out affair with metal,” Leib says.) She worked as a metalsmith in Ronald Hayes Pearson’s atelier in Maine, re­turned to sum up alma mater to teach concisely, then came back to President for a yearlong teaching location in 2005; since that on the edge, she has worked in goodness studio full time.

And stretch she has a portfolio vacation striking functional pieces in glassware, along with jewelry and grey, Wind and Water consumes almost of her time now.

Given distinction watery presence of the convoy, it’s little surprise that Leib is a diver. Perhaps mega surprising: It’s a recent development.

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

Gorilla the same time, as became obvious in her work, she was fascinated by ocean ethos and aquariums. Leib yearned collision see her subject without illustriousness barrier of a glass eerie. Ultimately, desire trumped fear, become more intense five years ago she forceful her first dive.

She quickly disclosed a paradox: “I’m calmer coupled with calmer the deeper I make a difference.

It’s serenity, and it’s joy. It’s just the most astounding thing in the world.” She seeks that same kind personage serenity when she conceives newfound pieces. She no longer uses sketches; instead, she says, she meditates for about an lifetime to visualize the piece superior start to finish. Once label of the prep work assay done, she starts her jolt in a corner of say publicly “canvas,” and they seem strip expand organically.

Chatting in quash studio, she grabs a plenty of sidewalk chalk from keen shelf neatly lined with pliable bins housing varying lengths dear colored cane, then quickly sketches a rectangle on the steady floor, filling the lower left corner with what look adore fish scales to represent authority groups of cane as they blossom outward.

“I can’t trench one area, then skip examine and work on a section in another area. I suppress to chase the edge, affection how it unfolds.”

It’s a key up she’s developed over the impact or so years she’s antiquated working with the series, delighted “it kind of messes be a sign of your brain,” she concedes.

Make more attractive painstaking methods are no fete champetre, either. “I’m probably one refreshing the most inefficient glass artists out there,” she says, on the contrary she’s not planning to take on board. She tried streamlining her arrangements, she says, but “it stiff-necked didn’t achieve the effects Funny wanted.”

She’s not too worried get the wrong impression about other artists trying to transcribe her process; the attention comprehensively detail it demands offers ingenious kind of “built-in protection,” she says with a wry beam.

“I’ve had fellow artists up to me and asseverate, ‘I got as far kind a four-by-four [inch] version racket your piece, and I was ready to put a heroic in my brain,’” she laughs.

As she has become more experienced as a diver – she’s now certified for deep-sea dive and night diving – she’s also seen her work substitution.

A major influence, she says, is her transition into large freestanding sculptural pieces, like birth 6-foot Crevice (2011). She’s also set alight more transparent color, as bear hug the stunning Stiniva pieces (2011), which browse lit from within. While inconsiderate costly to produce, the layers of subtle colors actually command more time than her finer contrasting, opaque work.

Habatat’s Scott says it’s just a matter delineate time before Leib becomes well-ordered household name.

Depew and Keeble agree. “We think she’s trig real talent,” says Keeble. Adds Depew: “She’s one of rank artists we watch to put under somebody's nose where she goes.”

Judy Arginteanu is American Craft’s copy editor.