GEORGE ELLIOT 1934 - 98

Hand made goblets.
Blown glass with threading

George Elliot was a student at Stourbridge in the 1950s. After his National Service in the Navy he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art and travelled on a bursary to Scandinavia. On graduation he joined Stevens and Williams as a designer, moving to Stourbridge College as a tutor in the early 1960s. There was still a strict demarcation between design and glassmaking, and George did not start to make his own glass until the small furnaces, developed by Harvey Littleton and Dominic Labino in Wisconsin were brought to Britain by San Herman. George soon transferred his energies to mastering the craft of freeblown glass, working on his own without the benefit of the traditional team.

This meant that he had to develop unique ways of carrying out procedures, like casting on a foot to a wine glass. Georges forms were, like him, honest, unpretentious, and quintessentially English. He, unlike many others, chose to devote his creative energies on the production of decorative domestic items, working at his studio in Bewdley, and after leaving teaching in the mid eighties, at his 15th century timber frame cottage in Herefordshire.

Although his formal repertoire was, on the face of it, traditional, he imbued his forms, whether vases, goblets or bottles with distinctive character, both in shape and decoration. He specialised in applied, linear decoration which was hooked into festoons round the forms, and added “splashed” applications of coloured shards onto clear and coloured backgrounds. His choice of the traditional was expressive of George as a person; he was, for example an expert with the English Long Bow, which he would make from scratch. His exact copies of Medieval glasses were much in demand from collectors and Museums.

He was very much a pioneer of the British Studio Glass movement and generations of students owe him a great debt. His works, which are quietly unique have a strong sense of identity, and are rare in the sense that they both maintain a sense of tradition, and yet bring that tradition into a contemporary context.

Keith Cummings,
May 2008

Biography pdf

George Elliot