When Peter and Marilyn Frank started blowing glass together 31/2 years ago, their artistic expression was already on fire.
Peter’s roots were in sculpture and glass. Marilyn’s were in graphic design — print, commercial film and video.
They met, married and merged their talents and imaginations to create F2, a company known for glass lighting and vessels of striking shapes that seem as weightless as a whisper.
It’s a lot like magic.
Instead of the sleight-of-hand that magicians are known for when wowing a crowd, the couple’s charm comes in the way they work together — a choreography of movement, the use of light and the appearance of airiness in the work that they create.
Watching them work together in the shaping and the blowing of the glass is like a dance itself. There is constant motion, turns that become twirls, slow steps, then faster ones. The Franks take turns leading, and then bow to chance when it sometimes cuts in.
The music they play as they work helps them get into their creative groove. You hear it in their Skokie home studio where they design and at Chicago Hot Glass, the cooperative glass-blowing studio where they turn their designs into the sensuous forms that are the signature of F2. Music is as essential to their process as sand is to glass. Something is always playing in the background.
Listen.
There’s that thump, thump that starts to build, then takes off from an ambient techno beat, sliding around the edge of rhythm and blues then into a shake-your-rump kind of funk.
It’s no wonder the Franks’ work shows movement, feeling and a kind of magic.
But the out-of-the-ordinary look of F2 still manages to be in sync with everyday reality. That’s part of the beauty of their glass design.
It is magic. It draws you to touch and that touch brings you closer to their flame.
Their work is infused with youthful energy and attitude and is uniquely shaped in the spirit of glass maestro Dale Chihuly. It’s all that but practical too.
“The things we make, they all have to live with us. We are not making art specifically for a gallery or a show,” says Peter Frank, 33, who began blowing glass 14 years ago.
“We also consider how a person who is going to own it is going to live with it,” Marilyn Frank, also 33, adds. “We don’t want our pieces to end up in the attic. We want our pieces to really become something that is part of their life.”
They’ve succeeded in making that happen.
Pushing the edge
“I just felt like their work was different than what I had seen,” says 33-year-old Robert McCarthy, who lives in a Lakeview townhouse. Three pendant lights by F2 hang over McCarthy’s dining table. They are cream colored with streaks of orange. The pendants are attached to stainless-steel rods from the ceiling. Another F2 design is on a table in the living room — an egg-shaped lamp.
Says McCarthy of F2’s designs: “It was unusual but not so avant-garde that it wouldn’t work with what I wanted to do [with the decor in his contemporary home].”
Peter and Marilyn Frank push the edge of style.
Their design sensibilities result in a clean, modern look seen in their work and their studio. Their life attitudes are grounded.
The Franks, who were living in New York, chose Skokie as their home address when Marilyn’s father, Hristo Devedjiev, became ill. They relocated in August 2001 to be closer to family, especially Marilyn’s mother, and moved into the Devedjievs’ modest bungalow-style home.
Lina Devedjiev, Marilyn’s mother, is a nurse and has an artistic hand of her own in the garden. It is her velvety red rose bushes that climb and frame each side of the front steps leading to the Frank’s modest bungalow-style home.
Inside, there is a marriage of generations, cultures and styles — a delicious stew of design aesthetics from the Philippines (Marilyn’s mother’s homeland), Eastern Europe (Hristo Devedjiev, who died in October 2001, was born in Bulgaria) and urban, Midcentury Modern (the Franks’ contribution).
But the basement — the Franks’ home design studio — is pure Peter and Marilyn, pure F2.
Though underground and windowless, a sense of lightness emanates from the studio, thanks to the shades of white on the walls and the citrusy green-and-white custom linoleum floor. Modern furnishings come from sources as varied as IKEA, Modernica, Vitra and eBay.
Their sense of style is also seen in the quirky use of miniature silver Christmas ornaments hung along the rim of the basement’s recessed lights. Suddenly, ordinary ceiling lights cast a mirrored-like shimmer.
Double duty
They are experts at the art of turning the ordinary into something extraordinary. A dark basement into an aerie. Sand into stunning blown glass. Off hours into a skyrocketing fine-craft career.
The glass vases and lamps the Franks create as F2 are designed, blown and assembled when Peter is away from his job as a surgical technician at Rush North Shore Hospital and when Marilyn is not at her job in the accounting department at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Sometimes their “other career” finds them in their basement design studio. Other times, at Chicago Hot Glass in Humboldt ParkDonning gloves, protective sleeves and sunglasses, Marilyn and Peter begin shaping their designs in furnaces heated at 2,000 degrees and then place them in a cooler oven set at 900 degrees.
“We don’t look at this [our day jobs] as taking away from the time we want to create so much as looking at the work we do as being another form of income to support ourselves,” Peter says. “Given the fact that it’s unrelated to what we do in our art, we feel free to create.
“We feel our work has really taken off since our move [to Skokie],” Peter says. “We feel like we’re in the right place.”
Peter, who moved a lot growing up with a father who was in the military, has always been at home with his love for art. He graduated in the mid-`90s from Tyler School of Art, outside of Philadelphia with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art. His focus was sculpture and glass, and after graduation, he ran the glass studio at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Marilyn graduated from Columbia College in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design, and moved to New York in 1994.
In New York, she had her own design studio called 52mm. Her clients included MTV, Showtime, VH1 and the National Hockey League.
“My work as a designer has always been very communication centered,” says Marilyn, who learned glass blowing from Peter. “I operate on intuition and emotion so I was able to bring that to some of our design work. It wasn’t hard for me to get involved in the glass because what it brings here is that energy that comes from the heart, that fuels the design and the feeling you get when you see the work.”
The artist’s hand
The intuitive elements that go into the work seem on target with the way people incorporate glass designs in their home.
“More people are seeing the functional work as attractive because it is handmade,” says Chris Rifkin, a board member at The Glass Art Society, based in Seattle, one of the country’s hottest areas for glass. “It’s more fun to have than . . . a set of glasses from Wal-Mart that was made somewhere by someone who you don’t know.”
The artist’s personal touch was part of the attraction for Jim Adams, an oral surgeon who lives in a South Loop loft. It is the hand of the artist that he sees in F2 designs.
The Franks’ pieces are a natural for his loft’s cloudlike atmosphere of white-on-white open space, with unobstructed south and west corner views of the city.
On the coffee table, there’s one circular dish design with a multitude of tiny air bubbles. (“It’s like tonic water with a dash of blue color in it,” Adams says.) In the bathroom, there is a white vase shaped like a teardrop. Place a single flower in it and the vase seems to take on the shape of a human body.
Lee Pomerance, who co-owns No Place Like, a home furnishings gallery in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, with Boyce Moffitt, says the couple’s sensibilities are on target with what people are looking for in functionality and beauty.
In price tag too, adds Brad Cook, owner of SHOW, a home lifestyle shop in Los Angeles, where F2 designs are also sold. “It’s not unusual for blown glass to start well above $1,000,” he says. But F2 prices start at $200 for vessels and top at $2,000 for some lighting pieces.
“People love their big bold shapes,” Cook says, “and the fact they are moderately priced and accessible.”
F2 designs are available at No Place Like, 300 W. Grand Ave., 312-822-0550; or visit www.noplacelike.com. SHOW is at 1722 N. Vermont Ave. in Los Angeles, 323-644-1960, or visit www.showlifestyle.com.
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The New Wave rolling in
Upcoming stories
– Guess what’s coming back? Wallpaper — and Kyra and Robertson Harnett of the Brooklyn-based design studio, twenty2, saw it coming and have filled a void with their fresh take on hand-screened wallpaper.
– San Francisco-based surface designer Lotta Jansdotter has a clean, uncommon style that merges a modern, urban spirit with lovely natural themes. The young designer of textiles, handbags, glass, ceramics and stationery was born on an island off Finland and raised in Stockholm — and those fresh Scandinavian roots ring loud and clear in her work.
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– “Technology drives design” today, says Shea Soucie, who with Martin Horner makes up the top Chicago-based design firm Soucie Horner Ltd. It’s that kind of understanding of clients’ needs and desires that has made their work such a success. (See the June 13 issue of Home&Garden).
– Maria Yee takes her cues from the way we live and interprets Asian styles for the contemporary home. If you’ve made a furniture purchase at Crate and Barrel, Room & Board or Retrospect, you’ve unknowingly gotten to know her. (See the May 30 issue of Home&Garden)
– Liz Galbraith is the only artisan in the United States using hand-blocking to create a commercial line of fabrics. While this is a primitive method, the result is so appealing that chic world-class designers fancy her fabrics and her work is turning up as the latest in fashion-forward decorating. (See the May 30 issue of Home&Garden)
– Fast becoming known for the lyrical, sensuous things he is creating, 25-year-old Paul Cocksedge surprises and delights with the way he harnesses conductive properties and unleashes creativity on lighting designs. (See the April 18 issue of Home&Garden.)
– Being the eldest of six children, Josiane Raphael was responsible for the most fragile things in the family’s West African home. When it was time to set the table, Raphael’s mother entrusted her to put out the linens and the china. Today, with her Ebotan by Josiane Raphael tableware and flatware, she is setting tables with “blessings” and fine china that rival those of more well-known chinamakers. (See the March 7 issue of Home&Garden.)
– In a matter of about five years, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec of France — designers of furniture, furnishings and “micro architecture” — have managed to turn some of the most important heads in the design business; be lauded by the design press; publish two books; mount exhibitions galore; and assemble a body of work that successful designers twice their age would be proud to call their own. . (See the Jan. 18 issue of Home&Garden.)
– In the world of artisans, The New Wave is a virtual tsunami of talent. Painter Anne Leuck Feldhaus, furniture designer/woodworker Jamey Rouch, ceramist Heather Hug, glass blowers Douglas and Renee Sigwarth — all featured at the One of a Kind Show and Sale at The Merchandise Mart — are part of this brave new wave. (See the Nov. 30, 2003 issue of Home&Garden.)
