Ronald Pennell

Last updated

Ronald Pennell is a British artist, engraver, especially in glass engraving, and sculptor.

Contents

Early life

Pennell was born and grew up in Birmingham. He received early training at the Moseley School of Art, and subsequently at Birmingham School of Art (1952–1956) was a pupil of Cyril Shiner. [1]

Gem engraving

In 1957 Pennell received a German scholarship to study gem engraving. Working under the gem-engraver Hermann Waldmann in Idar-Oberstein, Pennell began a long association with German and central European art and education. He later developed a personal friendship and professional relationship with the Czech glass engraver Jiri Harcuba, as well as with teachers and students at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. [2]

On his return to England Pennell was appointed lecturer at Birmingham College of Art where he met his wife, Betty, and taught metal engraving, drawing and design. In the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Pennell continued to maintain contacts in Germany, entering exhibition and design competitions. [3] In 1964, he and Betty left teaching to establish freelance studios in rural Herefordshire. Concentrating on developing his range, including bronze medallic art, Pennell refrained from exhibiting his work until 1974, when he was offered a solo show [4] organised by the newly restructured Crafts Council of Great Britain. [5]

Glass engraving

In 1977, Pennell began to engrave on glass, adapting gem engraving techniques to a larger scale. Initially working with commercially available glass vessels, he later transferred to working on vessel blanks, free-blown to his specification by the glass artist Carl Nordbruch. [6] In addition to working on clear, colourless glass, Pennell broadened his approach to include cased, flashed and graal glasses. In 1979, he exhibited at the Corning Museum World Glass Exhibition and World Tour, which brought his work to international attention. He was also represented in the Corning Museum New Glass Review throughout the 1980s. His work displays a complex, humorous iconography, in which an everyman figure (often represented by the artist, watched over by his Jack Russell terrier) engages with forces of nature which may be agrarian, or embodied in the forms of crocodiles, owls, women and mythical beings. [5]

Sculpture

Pennell also works as a sculptor, producing medals and reliefs in cast bronze, [7] examples of which are in the collections of the British Museum [8] and Goldsmiths' Hall in London. A group of larger scale animal sculptures in stained wood date mainly from the 1990s. He created a new series of figurative sculpture in cast glass following his professorship at the University of Wolverhampton.

Exhibitions and collections

Since 1974, Pennell has exhibited in Britain, Europe, the United States and Japan, including regular exhibitions this century in London and internationally with Contemporary Applied Arts. [9] In 1999 a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work, Modern Myths: The Art of Ronald Pennell in Glass and Bronze organised by Wolverhampton Art Gallery toured the UK. [10] In 2013 he and Betty held a joint exhibition, Gardens – Myths – Magic, at the Ruthin Craft Centre. [11] His work is in collections including those of the Toyama Glass Art Museum, The Victoria & Albert Museum; The National Museum of Applied Arts, Prague; The Musée Nationale des Arts Decoratifs, Paris; Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art; Koganezaki Glass Museum, Japan; Ebeltoft Museum, Denmark; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York; Nottingham Castle Museum; Norwich Castle Museum.

Later life

Although leaving formal teaching in 1964, Pennell has maintained a career as an educator. He holds a Professorial Fellowship (from 1993) at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, where he was also awarded the Gold Medal (1993) and the Highest Honour (1996). He was also Visiting Professor of Glass Studies at the University of Wolverhampton (1998-2001).

In 2005 Pennell was interviewed by the British Library for the National Life Stories Collection.

A bibliography relating to Ronald Pennell's career until 1999 is listed in Modern Myths: The art of Ronald Pennell in glass and bronze, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1999. In 1988, The Welsh Arts Council commissioned a film "Ronald Pennell – engraver" for the Arts Channel.

Related Research Articles

Portland Vase Roman cameo glass vase, dated to between AD 1 and AD 25,

The Portland Vase is a Roman cameo glass vase, which is dated to between AD 1 and AD 25, though low BC dates have some scholarly support. It is the best known piece of Roman cameo glass and has served as an inspiration to many glass and porcelain makers from about the beginning of the 18th century onwards. It is first recorded in Rome in 1600–1601, and since 1810 has been in the British Museum in London. It was bought by the museum in 1945 and is normally on display in Room 70.

Cameo (carving) method of carving

Cameo is a method of carving an object such as an engraved gem, item of jewellery or vessel. It nearly always features a raised (positive) relief image; contrast with intaglio, which has a negative image. Originally, and still in discussing historical work, cameo only referred to works where the relief image was of a contrasting colour to the background; this was achieved by carefully carving a piece of material with a flat plane where two contrasting colours met, removing all the first colour except for the image to leave a contrasting background.

Private collection Privately owned collection of works, usually a collection of art

A private collection is a privately owned collection of works. In a museum or art-gallery context, the term signifies that a certain work is not owned by that institution, but is on loan from an individual or organization, either for temporary exhibition or for the long term. This source is usually an art collector, although it could also be a school, church, bank, or some other company or organization. By contrast, collectors of books, even if they collect for aesthetic reasons, are called bibliophiles, and their collections are typically referred to as libraries.

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.

Engraved glass

Engraved glass is a type of decorated glass that involves shallowly engraving the surface of a glass object, either by holding it against a rotating wheel, or manipulating a "diamond point" in the style of an engraving burin. It is a subgroup of glass art, which refers to all artistic glass, much of it made by "hot" techniques such as moulding and blowing melting glass, and with other "cold" techniques such as glass etching which uses acidic, caustic, or abrasive substances to achieve artistic effects, and cut glass, which is cut with an abrasive wheel, but more deeply than in engraved glass, where the engraving normally only cut deeply enough into the surface to leave a mark. Usually the engraved surface is left "frosted" so a difference is visible, while in cut glass the cut surface is polished to restore transparency. Some pieces may combine two or more techniques.

David Revere McFadden was Chief Curator and Vice President for Programs and Collections at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City from 1997 until his retirement in 2013.

John Farleigh British artist

John Farleigh, also known as Frederick William Charles Farleigh, was an English wood-engraver, noted for his illustrations of George Bernard Shaw's work The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, which caused controversy when released due to the religious, sexual and racial themes within the writing and John Farleigh's complementary wood engravings commissioned by Shaw for the book. He is also known for his illustrations of D. H. Lawrence's work, The Man Who Died, and for the posters he designed for London County Council Tramways and London Transport. He was also a painter, lithographer, author and art tutor.

Pauly & C. – Compagnia Venezia Murano

Pauly & C. - Compagnia Venezia Murano is one of the most ancient glass factory of Murano: it was founded more than one hundred and forty years ago. This company produces glass art, most notably Roman murrine, mosaics and chandeliers.

Engraved gem Artistic technique

An engraved gem, frequently referred to as an intaglio, is a small and usually semi-precious gemstone that has been carved, in the Western tradition normally with images or inscriptions only on one face. The engraving of gemstones was a major luxury art form in the Ancient world, and an important one in some later periods.

Cameo glass

Cameo glass is a luxury form of glass art produced by cameo glass engraving or etching and carving through fused layers of differently colored glass to produce designs, usually with white opaque glass figures and motifs on a dark-colored background. The technique is first seen in ancient Roman art of about 30 BC, where it was an alternative to the more luxurious engraved gem vessels in cameo style that used naturally layered semi-precious gemstones such as onyx and agate. Glass allowed consistent and predictable colored layers, even for round objects.

Erwin Eisch German artist

Erwin Eisch is a German artist who works with glass. He is also a painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. With that of his friend and colleague in glass Harvey Littleton, Eisch's work in glass embodies the ideas of the international Studio Glass movement. Along with glass artists Sam Herman and Sybren Valkema, Eisch is considered a founder of Studio Glass in Europe.

Leonard Charles Wyon

Leonard Charles Wyon was a British engraver of the Victorian era most notable for his work on the gold and silver coinage struck for the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887 and the bronze coinage of 1860 with the second ("bun") head portrait, in use from 1860 to 1894.

Alison Kinnaird

Alison Kinnaird MBE, MA, FGE is a glass sculptor, Celtic musician, teacher and writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1949. She is one of the foremost and most original modern glass engravers in Scotland.

Helen Francesca Mary Binyon was a British artist and author. She was also a watercolour painter, an illustrator and a puppeteer.

Caspar Lehmann

Caspar Lehmann was a German gem cutter and glass engraver.

John Finnie (painter)

John Finnie was a Scottish landscape painter and engraver. He was best known in London for his original mezzotint engravings of landscape, and exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Painters, Etchers, and Engravers. When he moved to Towyn in northern Wales he painted numerous landscape paintings of places in the Capel Curig area, such as Snowdon. He was headmaster of the Liverpool Mechanics Institute and School of Art from 1855 until 1896. Several paintings related to him are on display in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Portsmouth Museum.

Lorenz Natter

Johann Lorenz Natter (1705–1763) was a German gem-engraver and medallist.

Alison Geissler

Alison Cornwall Geissler MBE, née McDonald, was one of the foremost glass engravers in Scotland during the mid-twentieth century.

John Kingsley Cook (1911-1994) was an English artist, teacher and wood engraver.

Cut glass

Cut glass or cut-glass refers historically to glass shaped by grinding or drilling techniques applied as a secondary stage to a piece of glass made by conventional processes such as glassblowing. In fact today, the glass is often mostly or entirely shaped in the initial process by using a mould, or even imitated in clear plastic; traditional hand-cutting continues, but is a much more expensive product. Today the term refers as much to a style of decorating glass as to the manufacturing process; on vessels the style typically uses furrowed faces at angles to each other in complicated patterns, while pieces for lighting are cut with flat or curved facets all over.

References

  1. "Ronald Pennell, Made In The Middle - 30 Years 30 Makers". www.madeinthemiddle.org.
  2. Sylva Petrova, The relationship of Ronald Pennell to the history and current state of Central European thinking and culture, in Modern Myths: The art of Ronald Pennell in glass and bronze, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1999
  3. Gesellschaft fur Goldschmeidekunst, Hamburg, 1961
  4. Crafts Council of Great Britain. Ronald Pennell Rock Crystal Engraving, London, Crafts Council Gallery and Touring, 1974
  5. 1 2 Dan Klein, The Art of Ronald Pennell, in Modern Myths: The art of Ronald Pennell in glass and bronze, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1999
  6. "Living and Breathing Glass - Bethan Christopher". 12 July 2012.
  7. Mark Jones, The Medallic Art of Ronald Pennell, in Modern Myths: The Art of Ronald Pennell in Glass and Bronze, Antique Collectors Club, 1999
  8. P Attwood, 'Acquisitions of medals (1983-1987)', British Museum Occasional Paper 78, London, 1991
  9. "Contemporary Applied Arts: Ronald Pennell". www.caa.org.uk.
  10. Modern Myths: The art of Ronald Pennell in glass and bronze, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1999
  11. Gardens – Myths – Magic: Betty Pennell – Ronald Pennell, Ruthin Craft Centre, The Centre for the Applied Arts, Ruthin, Denbighshire.