Steuben Glass Fetes Fruit for Fall

October 14, 2008. In a studied ensemble arrangement, the crystal pieces that comprise Still Life, the aptly-titled fall collection for Steuben Glass by Beth Lipman, depict an Old Master canvas drained of color and texture but brought to life in three dimensions. All that’s missing from the series is a dead rabbit fresh from the hunt. Lipman’s vegan homage to those painstakingly rendered domestic vignettes painted between the 17th and 20th centuries and rife with the symbolism of good and evil, use Steuben crystal to memorialize a moment in time through fruits, nuts and leaves, and copy it as precisely as possible. Life-size and larger-than-life persimmons, poppy capsules, figs and litchi nuts celebrate perishables – food and time as much as lost traditions in the arts and the domestic sphere. “Glass foils the viewer’s eye,” Lipman writes about Still Life. “It frustrates our efforts to claim and own what we see because those things change constantly when you are looking at glass.” And when you are moving through time. steuben.com