Gary Beecham

Gary Beecham is an American glass maker. Born in 1955, Beecham earned his BA in art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1978. In his youth, he starred in a Walt Disney production called “An Otter in the Family.” It was this experience that gave him a thirst for fame and fortune beyond his humble rural roots. His work has been heavily influenced by ancient glass, both in form and in technique. The ancients treated glass as a plastic gem material, a substance that could be colored, stretched, melted, and carved by the maker. 

Beecham has experimented with numerous ways of manipulating glass involving blowing, fusing and cutting. During career that has stretched multiple decades, he has become well-known for heavy, thick-walled vessels. For the imagery in these pieces, he first makes up a wide palette of colored overlay rods.  Some pieces contain textile patterns that are then introduced into the crystal glass piece as it is being blown, creating the illusion of glass “fabric” floating in the bowl of the vessel, often with a second or third pattern appearing on one of the vessel’s reflecting surfaces.  Others, incorporating complex millefiori, are formed into mosaics of brilliant color.  The imagery of these pieces has been suggested by influences as divergent as astronomical forms, undersea creatures, and figures from a Persian rug.

By 1982, Beecham worked in an assortment of studios when he met his future wife, Mary Lynn White; and soon after they began working together and settled in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. It was here that her built his own studio in 1984. Beecham has been known to cite Harvey Littleton as a huge influence on his work; first as a professor, and later as a boss, mentor, and friend.  

Beecham’s work is represented in corporate and museum collections world-wide. Over the years, he has maintained a strong presence in Germany where he had a solo show in 1984. Additionally, he has a gallery in the south of France where he is a featured artist. In 1998, he received a Silver Prize in the International Exhibition of Glass Kanazawa in Japan, where he has shown regularly since 1985. Back at his home state of North Carolina, he has been recognized by the North Carolina Arts Council in 1996 for superior achievement by a Visual Arts Fellowship Grant. This grant allowed him to pursue his The Expanding Universe series, a body of sculptural work that has grown out of his use of colored overlay rods and fusing. Of this series, Beecham stated, “Since I was a boy, I have been an avid science fiction reader fascinated with concepts of space and time.  Photos from the Hubbell Space Telescope showing ancient galaxies on the edge of our present visible universe planted the seed for my series in glass and metal.” [1]

Beecham then turned his attention to the beautiful surroundings of his native mountains and scenery in exploring his Appalachian Landscape series. He has endeavored to fuse the pointillism of Seurat with the depth, color and dimension possible in glass with a wish to do justice to the majestic terrain of the Western North Carolina area. His work also reaches back to his love of Hellenistic glass. In that period of Greek history, glass sculpture and fabrication relied on factories producing billets of clear and colored glass. Artists purchased this glass to fuse into molds. The raw molded pieces were then carved into their final forms. Beecham's Vitrolith series draws from the shape of ancient fortresses and standing stones using some of these early techniques.

[1] https://www.southernhighlandguild.org/member/garybeecham/