Toots Zunsky “Night Street Chaos,” 1998
“Night Street Chaos,” by Toots Zunsky is a piece of glass art created through the filet-de-verre technique. This is a tulip-shaped piece of artwork that has a series of strips of multi- colored glass. The arts title is chaos, after a chaotic Paris street. The artist uses a brightly colored, busy, and chaotic Paris street as the inspiration of this artwork. The artist uses various brightly colored, irregular shapes of glass to give the artwork a sense of movement. The piece is a 3-D artwork, which appears to be swinging back and forth methodically and slowly. This movement is the depiction of the movement of warm colors and fragrances of the busy street on a sunny afternoon. The artists employ multi- colored glass as their media (Chambers, Karen and Oldknow 23). Multi- colored glass has been in use for centuries as three dimensional sculptures and structures. Colored glass is glass with metallic salts added to it. This quality makes the sculptures and structures ductile, an important aspect for easy melting and moldings. Toots uses the “filet-de-verre,” technique, which is the fusion and thermo formation of glass threads (Chambers, Karen and Oldknow 23). The media and technique present a piece of art that is timeless and yet brittle since the glass is fragile.
Toots uses visual basic as the illustration elements and principles of design in “Night Street Chaos.” Visual element in the artwork entails the use of multiple colors and curved edge of the sculpture. This means that the model under the basic structural principle. The artist uses the principle of visual perception to give the art an appearance of weight, movement, and chaos. This Toot did by aligning the artwork in a curved way to give the eye the impression of movement. In retrospect, the artist has successfully used the visual principle of APPEAR (Chambers, Karen and Oldknow 23), to depict the chaos in the street she witnessed. The artwork also has the principle of unity, since the glasswork leads the viewer to use comprehensive words whose meaning is in unity.
The content of the artwork indicates the happiness of the past. The content design is to make the artwork look like a billowing seaweed in the water current. Toots creates a piece of art that a painting and sculpture transpire by making glass threads. The artist creates the artwork from a unique arrangement of glass threads with her “filet-de-Verre” technique. In this technique, the glass threads and colors lead the viewer to a wavy fluid movement. The movement changes in a different light and at different angles, creating the impression of a street with various scents, noises, and colors. The multi- colored glass uses the profusion technique giving it an appeal.
I find Toots Kunsky’s (1998) artwork a piece of literature, through which the author expresses their feelings, perceptions, and personality. The different shapes and sizes of glass threads represent the unfamiliarity of the different places, people, and street participants. The sculpture has a design that looks like a flower with bold, natural colors like blue, yellow, and green. The colors give the perception of vividness, wildness, and activeness, and feelings of joy present in the busy str
Work Cited
Chambers, Karen S. and Oldknow, Tina. Clearly Inspired: Contemporary Glass and its Origins. Tampa Museum of Art, 1999.
Fichner-Rathus. TEXTBOOK: Understanding Art (10th Edition). Cengage Publishing, 2011. Print.
