• Happy New Year!
• Quotes of the Month
• Staff Pick of the Month
• Artist of the Month: Dorothy Hafner
• Calendar

HAPPY NEW YEAR! As we begin the new year, all of us at Holsten Galleries want to wish each of you a year filled with abundance, great health, safety and inner peace. At this time when there is so much going on in our world not to be happy about, we want take a moment to list some of the things for which we are deeply grateful:

• Family and friends.
• The beauty of the natural world. We are particularly fortunate here in the Berkshire to be surrounded by hills, trees, lakes, rivers and abundant wildlife.
• Our wonderful relationships here in the gallery with each other, with our artists and with so many of you out there that we have had the privilege of getting to know over the years.
• Art. We are so grateful to be involved in a business which helps to bring more beauty and joy into all of our lives. We are grateful to our artists who have dedicated their lives to creating objects of beauty and to you, the collectors, who make it possible for both the artists and ourselves to make a living in glass art. Harvey Littleton used to speak often about the artist-gallery-collector partnership and at this point I think we can literally think of it as our artist-gallery-collector community!

Thank you all for helping to make 2005 a great year for us and we look forward to continuing our relati

onship in 2006!

Kenn Holsten

Quotes of the Month

"Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"True art takes note not merely of form, but also of what lies behind." - Mahatma Gandhi

Staff Pick of the Month: " Fan Dance" by Dorothy Hafner

Here are our reasons for choosing this as our pick of the month:

Kenn Holsten: What I love most about "Fan Dance" are the wonderful colors. They are at once subtle and yet very compeling. Seen in person the diaphanous layers of color are all the more fascinating as the light passing through the piece projects them onto the wall behind the panel.

Mary Childs: "Imagine that you could capture the intricate, living dance of light and color through layers of fused glass! With "Fan Dance", Dorothy Hafner has succeeded in creating a subtle feast of light, color, and movement for the eye and heart.

Jim Schantz: "Fan Dance is a breakthrough work by Dorothy Hafner. It is exiting to see the combination of the idiosycratic forms that Dorothy is known for combined with a free-form spontinaety. The colors evoke the passing of time during a tropical sunset. It is a landmark Hafner work."

Stanley Wooley: "Fan Dance" is Dorothy Hafner's most complex work to date. Warm, vibrant colors move playfully across this triptych. The syncopated design and delicious colors are echoed by lush shadows cast on the wall. These glass panels express the essence of Joy.

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Artist of the Month:
Dorothy Hafner

Dorothy Hafner is one of those rare artists whose craft is not limited to one medium or style; she is constantly stretching her artistic limits in the search for the true expression of her vision.

Dorothy has come to glass through a long and dedicated process of defining her love of form and color. She received her BA, Fine Arts from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY in 1974, and began working with design, ceramics, and porcelain. Her work was so innovative that she eventually designed and produced a line for Tiffany and Co. and was also a principal designer for Rosenthal. Her love of color and pattern led her to design Carpets for V'Soske, and fabric for Fieldcrest Cannon.

There came a point for Dorothy where she wanted to reconnect with her artistic roots, and began exploring other mediums, including glassblowing, which immediately fascinated her. In glass, Dorothy felt that she could capture a certain play of color, light, and pattern which had so far eluded her. She began using a Venetian technique called "tessare" to form vessels that layered patches of shaped color to create layered "paintings in the round". She has since used a variation of that technique to create individual and suites of architectural panels comprised of layered, fused glass.

Dorothy Hafner has received numerous awards, including the Fellisimo Design Award from the NY Foundation of the Arts, the Design Excellance, Stuttgard Design Center Award, and Westerwald Prize for Industrial Design. Her work is featured in many publications, and is exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide.

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Upcoming Events:

January 13-16, 2006: Palm Beach 3. West Palm Beach Convention Center. We will present an all new body of work by Lino Tagliapietra.

May 28-January 16, 2006: GARDENS OF GLASS, Major exhibition of Dale Chihuly at Kew Gardens, London Link is http://www.rbgkew.org.uk

Please contact the gallery for further information or to obtain catalogues.

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