Richard Marquis

He is considered a pioneer of American contemporary glass art, and is noted for his quirky, playful work that incorporates flawless technique and underlying seriousness about form and color.

Richard Marquis was born on September 17, 1945, in Bumble Bee, Arizona,[2] the second son of an itinerant grocery-store worker and a ceramics-hobbying mother.

[3] Because of disagreements with his father, Marquis left home at fifteen, though he remained in his Southern California high school, where he developed an interest in ceramics.

[4] Given the title of guest designer in the Venini factory, he worked his way through the glassblowing line, watching the masters, making drawings, and then doing it himself.

Many of his early objects, inspired by his Berkeley free-speech-movement days, were shaped like oversized recreational drug capsules, and included American flags, hammer-and-sickle symbols, and four-letter f-bombs.

In 1982 he pulled up stakes in both California locations, and moved entirely to an island in Puget Sound, where he maintains his studio today.

There are also a number of signature forms, most notably murrine teapots, but also including geometric shapes, zanfirico handles, eggs, and elephants.

His collecting 'categories' include Model A Ford Trucks, Studebakers, metal advertising signs, old pump insect sprayers, rubber squeeze toys, salt shakers, graniteware, anything with a Mexican Siesta or English Setter motif, Hallware, Aloha shirts (he sold this collection to the musician Rod Stewart), push-button knives, paint-by-number paintings, burnt match furniture, outboard motors, old slide viewers, Christmas bubble lights, kid's chemistry sets from the 1940s and 1950s, Fiesta tableware, old cans, bamboo fly rods, fat pencils, and expired, unexposed film.