Dan Dailey's glass is as catchy as a tune. Its lighthearted humour sticks in the mind, rather like a good joke. Dailey has the confidence of knowing that he can make us laugh, and like any good performer he works hard to entertain his audience. His compositions, with their range of colourful glass, often held together by an armature of precision-turned shiny metal rivets or nuts and bolts, poke good-natured fun at the world, He is brilliant at delivering poignant messages disguised as wit, and his artistic integrity is such that he also gives us the satisfaction of knowing we can depend on their being packaged with consummate craftsmanship. Dailey appeared on the contemporary glass scene at a time when there was much debate about the difference between art and craft, but ignoring the debate, he used glass in such an original way that it transcended all the argument.

Dan Dailey graduated in 1972 as a Master of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design, where he had been among the first students to be in Dale Chihuly's class, However, he was never one for the kind of amorphous free expression in hot glass that was fashionable among Chihuly acolytes, and from the beginning displayed a preference for clean lines and tightly organized composition. He had already received a degree in fine arts from Philadelphia College of Arts and spent a couple of years teaching ceramics at Southeastern Massachusetts University. After graduating from Rhode Island he was awarded a Fulbright Hayes scholarship, which allowed him to spend a year in Venice, working at the Venini glass factory on Murano. On returning to the United States he settled in Boston, and in 1979 he founded the glass programme at the Massachusetts College of Art. He has taught or lectured at many major American glass schools, including Pilchuck and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. He is very active on the American contemporary glass scene, a popular figure whose good-natured humour extends to everything he does. Dailey met his wife in 1974 when she was a student at the Massachusetts College of Art, She has since become a distinguished jeweller, many of whose jewels feature glass combined with metalwork. She also helps Dailey with the fabrication of the metal parts he needs in his work. The demand for Dailey's work is now such that he has a permanent team of helpers who assist him with all aspects of his work, whether that be glass-blowing, metalwork, or the administrative tasks involved in running what is in effect a small industry.

Some of Dailey's compositions, with titles such as "Sick as a Dog", "Fatigue", or "The Principles of Decor", remind us how ridiculous life can be. These are mainly wall pieces, cartoons in glass carefully constructed or pieced together with a combination of shapes cut out of plate glass and vitrolite glass, Vitrolite is a slick, shiny, hard-edged material available in a great variety of colours. It allows Dailey to use a whole range of colour accents that add to the comedy. These can be in the form of exaggerated cosmetics (hideous lip gloss, for example) or totally unsuitable accessories (designer glasses, costume jewellery). The draftsmanship of his wall pieces is deliberately naive, the style a little reminiscent of 11 painting by numbers", all of which adds to Dailey's version of comicstrip humour in these works.

A delightful series of table sculptures called "Figurative Busts" are either mood or character portraits. Dailey displays his humour again in a series of vessels, some of them produced at his own studio and some in collaboration with individual artists such as Mark Weiner (his assistant at Pilchuck) and Lino Tagliapietra. Some limited series pieces have been produced in association with important glass manufacturers, including Steuben, Waterford, and the French glass company Daum (he has collaborated with Daum as an independent artist since 1976). In these he works through a host of ideas as diverse as urban landscape, birds flying and landing, and exotic fish (which he observed while underwater fishing in the Caribbean). The production vessels made at Daum have simple classical forms and are made of solid thick-walled glass, often with sandblasted or enamelled decoration. Dailey has also collaborated with Daum on a series of pate-de-verre sculptures that have a distinctly Art Deco feel to them. The sculptures are figurative and more generic than the precisely epigrammatic wall pieces, often with a single figure embodying a specific concept, such as speed or greed. The unique vessels that he makes in his own studio may be multi-media pieces, sometimes presented on complex pedestal structures that give them a sense of overblown importance, once again poking fun at convention.

As a teenager Dailey had displayed talent as a cartoonist and even expressed the wish to make this his career. He is an excellent draftsman and uses drawing to put his thoughts down on paper. The drawings are more than sketches: ideas seem to emerge on paper fully thought out and ready to be executed in glass. Industrial design was also a part of his youth. His father was an industrial designer and Dailey's work has a close affinity with product design. It is this unusual combination of interests, together with a talent for observation and a compelling sense of humour, that make Dan Dailey the artist that he is.

He takes his craft very seriously and over the years has explored virtually every area of glass-making, giving him an encyclopeclic knowledge of glass that allows him to use it in many different ways. "Invention is based on knowledge," he says. Plate glass, blown glass, engraving, and sandblasting often all have a role to play in the same piece. Yet there is no hint of craft exhibitionism in this. Dailey has enjoyed learning about the different ways in which glass can be worked and used, and this enjoyment is communicated to us in the highly polished performance that he delivers as a comedian in glass. He knows exactly when a particular technique will work effectively, and the complexity of skills involved in his work only strikes the viewer as an afterthought. In his choice of mixed media his preference is for metals (aluminium, nickel-plated brass, and bronze among them) used in conjunction with glass, but he also uses painted wood and sometimes found objects (even, in one instance, pencil stubs with eraser caps). The materials are worked separately and fitted together with consummate skill, making a seamless passage from one material to the next.

In a way the fact that Dailey chose glass is really mostly an accident of history: there is a feeling that he would have been equally successful at expressing himself whatever he had chosen as his preferred medium because he has such a lot to say. In the early 1970s glass was "hot news" in American art school circles. Having discovered it, Dailey decided to leave no stone unturned in investigating it. Paradoxically, as much as he is part of the contemporary glass scene, he is also a loner who has forged his own, very personal way of using glass to comment on the world. "I've always felt like an outsider in the glass scene (even though I know 90 per cent of the people working with glass) ... Glassblowing, the process, never was my inspiration... I make everything from drawings, and nearly all my pieces are about something, instead of colour and form being the reason for the work."

Because he is such a communicative narrator, Dailey is in great demand for commissioned work. If he is given a subject to comment on in glass, his client knows that he will be fully responsive whether the commission be a sculpture or an interior design feature such as a balustrade for a staircase, a piece of furniture, or a door. Dailey has been responsible for a whole series of crazy lamps, where his ideas and his making skills quite simply light up. Among the first of these lamps that he designed was "Pistachio Lamp", made at the Venini glass factory when he was there in 1972; the name refers mainly to the pistachio-coloured glass used. "Antelope Lamps", "Man Lamp and Woman Lamp", and "Bird Lamps" (all dating from 1986) are pairs of wall lights, each of them playfully conceived, and unlike any antelope, man and woman, or bird one could ever have dreamed of. Among his many public and private commissions is a series of lighting fixtures for the refurbished Rainbow Rooms at the Rockefeller Center in New York City.

It is not surprising that Dailey was chosen to work on the refurbishment of the Rainbow Rooms. The Rockefeller Center is one of the most spectacular surviving examples of American Modernism. There is a slickness about the Dailey style that reminds one of Art Deco and particularly the 1930s American variety, which was more streamlined than the European version and drew its inspiration from the aesthetics of machinery and the linearity of skyscraper construction, Add to this a love of comic-strip imagery and the fact that Dailey grew up in the 1960s, when the art of funk, whether in ceramics or fine art, was in its heyday. All these influences, combined with intelligence, a great talent to amuse, and a profound respect for his craft, make everything Dan Dailey does immensely enjoyable. Moreover, while it is all delightful and great fun, it also gives food for thought when the laughter has died down.

This essay appeared in the book "Artists in Glass - Late Twentieth Century Masters in Glass", first published in Great Britain in 2001 by Mitchell Beazley, ISBN 1840003405.
Dan Klein is international Executive Director of Phillips, London, and one of the world's experts in studio glass.
Other books published by Mr. Klein include: Glass: A Contemporary Art, International New Glass and History of Glass.

If you would like to experience a day in Dan Dailey's studio, please feel free to follow this link.