David Reekie

David Reekie is an eminent English glass sculptor who uses drawing and glass casting to express his unique vision of the human condition.

His art can be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, as well as in several other public collections in the United Kingdom.

A founding member of British Artists in Glass, now the Contemporary Glass Society, Reekie's work has featured in countless periodicals and in over 60 exhibits worldwide.

Born in the London Borough of Hackney (1947), David Reekie discovered an early love of drawing that has remained central to his life and work for well over four decades.

Distinguished by his talent with a pencil and an active perceptive faculty he was encouraged to attend art college.

Reekie studied art at Stourbridge College of Art (1967–1970).

Set in the heart of the UK's traditional glass making industry, Stourbridge College of Art was a natural place of innovation and discovery in the world of glass art.

What is thought to be the only complete remaining glass cone of its kind, reaching 100 ft into the air and enclosing a furnace around which glass has been made for almost two centuries, the Red House Cone, dominates the landscape.

At Stourbridge, Reekie studied under the pioneering glass sculptor Harry Seager whose plate glass stacking pieces, were ahead of his time.

He also drew inspiration from Professor Keith Cummings commonly known as the father of English cast glass.

A pioneer of cire perdue, or the lost wax casting technique, Professor Cummings is an internationally recognised glass artist and author of a number of books on the subject.

Reekie went on to study at Birmingham College of Art Education, eventually obtaining a fellowship in glass at Lincolnshire and Humberside Arts (1975–1980).

In 1976 Reekie was part of a group of glass artists who founded British Artist's in Glass, now the Contemporary Glass Society This organisation was partly instrumental in bringing Reekie's work international recognition.

In 1988, he was awarded a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship to research glass in architecture in the US.

His work is currently shown in America by Thomas R.Riley Galleries, Cleveland, Ohio.

Reekie has lectured extensively on glass sculpture and his own casting technique, in the UK Europe, US and Australia.

An innovator both artistically and technically in the field, Reekie's work more often than not, begins on the page with a sketch or a drawing.

These drawings are surreal in character and similar in attitude to the humorist John Tenniel, who worked first for Punch magazine and later collaborated with Lewis Carroll in producing the illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.

Like Tenniel, Reekie is driven not so much by the inner nature or surface beauty of his medium, so much as by his observations of the foibles and failings of human and animal character.

As Jennifer Hawkins Opie of the Victoria and Albert Museum puts is:

"Unlike many of his contemporaries, the intrinsic beauty of glass holds little fascination for Reekie; in his work the material must be pressed into the service of narrative and comment. His telling explorations of humankind's obsessions are unique in contemporary British glass and they tread a fine between comedy and tragedy"

This combination of pictorial satirist and skilled craftsman, places Reekie's work in the tradition of the London born painter, engraver and social critic, William Hogarth

The 18th-century Hogarth took a lively interest in London street life and the political questions of the day, which he expressed in his paintings and engravings.

A Londoner himself, Reekie states that one of the sources of his inspiration is newspaper photographs.

The penny dreadfuls of today perhaps providing a ready source of images and stories, revealing the often absurd nature of our relationships with one another and political life.

Reekie's drawings also share certain qualities with those of the French caricaturist Honoré Daumier.

The chequered shirt in Reekie's Different People may well be an implicit reference to the influence of Daumier on his Art.

While these drawings are the means by which Reekie initially expresses his ideas, what makes them unique among his forerunners, is that they are given three-dimensional form in coloured, cast glass.

An early enthusiast of cast glass, Reekie has developed his own distinct version of the lost wax casting method.

The lost wax process can be traced back to the Romans and involves creating a wax model which is then encased in a casting material and steamed out.

The piece is modelled first in wax with the base being moulded out of clay.

The modelling is a gradual process that takes about two weeks.

Reekie is not simply an artist, but a craftsman par excellence, and it is here the skills of his craft first come to the fore.

When the artist is satisfied with the model, it is carefully encased in a plaster and flint mould.

As soon as the mould is dry, the clay is gently removed and the wax model is steamed out.

The mould is now ready to be filled with glass cullet.

Whilst the mould is still damp, Reekie paints the inside surfaces with vitreous enamel which gives the glass the kind of 'painterly quality' that characterises his drawings: a technique perfected over many years.

In this way the colour is transferred to the three dimensional glass sculpture.

A displacement test, using a bucket of water in the manner of Archimedes, is used to measure the quantity of glass needed.

The mould is then filled with cullet and transferred to a kiln.