The “Fabricated Weird” series from the early 1980s signaled a new direction for Marquis. These pieces, which Marquis calls “visual notes,” were quickly assembled from the things that surrounded him in his studio, such as a broken piece of glass, a chunk of obsidian, and pieces of murrine cane.
The solid white murrine “spout” on this “pitcher” is actually a word cane that reads, “Chuck the duck / says life is / mostly hard work.” This was one of Marquis’s first pieces to incorporate an object from his collections: a souvenir painted bottle filled with sand.
Physical DescriptionBlown multicolored glass, filigrana cane, murrine cane, air twist, ground, cut, bonded, addition found object. Irregular sculpture in the form of a stylized non-functional pitcher; section of multi- colored twist cased in colorless with elongated pointed air inclusion has rounded top, cut or ground flat base, inscribed "Marquis #F.S.W. 19" on lower edge, and two ground spots on opposing sides; adhered to one polished spot is a "spout" consisting of a length of opaque white "Lord's prayer" millefiori with minute black inscription: "Chuck the duck/says life is/mostly hard work"; adhered to opposite side is an ovoid loop of a length of multi-colored millefiori cased in colorless cane; twist is adhered to a "potato" section of blown opaque light yellow cased in light brown with scattered indented "eyes", six evenly spaced ground areas to which are adhered radiating short lengths of square multi-colored millefiori cane with flat bases and four-sided end points, each cane is of different colors and configuration; "potato" is cut or ground flat where it joins the color twist on top and on the bottom where it is adhered to a "found" commercially produced paperweight of unknown origin with a flattened top, weight is hollow colorless glass filled with a sandpainting depicting a desert mountain landscape, open bottom is filled with a white "plaster". Provenance
Source
Richard Marquis
(American, b. 1945) - 1985-03-11
