Art should be encouraging you to feel, think, and believe in ideas beyond what you’ve sensed before. Everyone is an artist in my opinion and that’s why I feel art can connect with all to bring your senses into a more pure perspective while keeping old traditions alive. Hello, my name is Daniel Kettle and I hope you enjoy art as much as I do. I’ve always been fascinated with form, technique, and color with everything considered art.
My career started early in high school as I was drawn towards ceramics, jewelry, and woodworking. Not satisfied completely with these mediums I searched for something more. I ran across a glass marble maker while visiting New Orleans one year and knew from then on that I was going to blow glass. All the right ingredients with glass had matched my personality, more so I have always been fascinated with fire. Perfect! There were questions to be answered and my first one was why do I love the idea of fire and art so much? I had to find answers for all my questions and the first was where can I go to college for glass forming?
Relying on my high school teachers’ knowledge, they referred me to Emporia State University in Kansas. I spent the next four years studying the art of glass blowing and graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in 2005. From there, I spent time working for other glass blowers and furthered my studies of the equipment. A few years down the road I landed back in my hometown of Topeka, Kansas where I built and managed The Haute Shop with much help from generous individuals. I bought a house, built a new shop and the rest is history.
This brings us to today where I operate New Galaxy Glassworks. I am most intrigued with Italian cane and goblet making but feel my art has a strong connection with more contemporary organic forms and color. Trying to find a happy medium between all these elements is what I strive for. Gravity, heat, time, and physics have brought the art of glass to us so we can share it together as artists.