Dallas County Living Well Magazine July/August 2016 | Page 27

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By Melanie Hess

Photos by Turk Studio

t’s with this temperature; the temperature of a volcano,
that artist Carlyn Ray feels most alive.

That’s because it’s also the level of heat that is required
to melt glass. And while the well-known lyric, “a world
beyond your imagination,” from Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory is, in the story, referencing a chocolate
paradise, for Ray, a professional artist and Dallas native, her
mind envisions something different—a colorful haven made
solely from glass.
“Glass is an amazing material,” she stresses. “It epitomizes
the act of creation. It is dust, melted to the temperature of the
hottest material on earth, lava, and it becomes molten. It is
one of the few materials that you can actually blow into. It is
literally shaped by your breath.”
A professional glassblower based in Dallas, Ray claims she
still cannot know glass in its entirety.
“The potentials with glass are endless; the surface is only
scratched,” she says. “It is the one material that I can almost
guarantee that you will come into contact with every day.
From drinking glasses and windows, to spectacles and cell
phones. Glass is everywhere.”
An Early Adventure
Ray discovered her passion before she was even a teenager,
witnessing her first glass blowing with her parents at age 9.
At 14, she recalls standing in line at the Dallas Museum of
Art to meet Dale Chihuly, one of the more renowned glassblowers in the world. “He told me to come to his school, Pilchuck,” she says. “I looked at that as a personal invitation!”
After attending school at the College of William and Mary,
where she studied art and psychology, she was given the
opportunity to attend Penland Craft School, one of the oldest craft schools in the country, located in the Appalachian
Mountains. And it was work through an apprenticeship at
Penland that did eventually bring her to Chihuly’s school on
a 200-acre tree farm about an hour north of Seattle.
“I assisted artists there during the winter and then worked at
the school there for the next summer season” she says.
Ray was then hired on with Chihuly, Inc. In addition to learning the art, she also took this time to master the business side
of things and through teaching lessons got to know Chihuly
and his son personally. “He is not only a mentor and a brilliant businessman, but an amazing and insightful person,”
Ray says.
As her time at Chihuly wrapped up, Ray was afforded the
opportunity to work for the Corning Museum of Glass on a
cruise ship traveling to locations such as the Baltics, Mediterranean, and Caribbean. She traveled the world with this

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