"V I S I O N S O F L I G H T
Mark Raynes Roberts
Described as a master craftsman who hails from another era, Mark Raynes Roberts is Canada’s leading crystal artist, engraver and designer with an international reputation for his one-of-kind masterpieces in a medium few have mastered.
Trained as a specialist in engraving on metal, ivory and glass, Raynes Roberts studied in Britain under Ronald Pennell, a leading UK designer and engraver. An award-winning artist, and an Associate Fellow of the British Guild of Glass Engravers, Raynes Roberts creates crystal sculptures remarkable for their hand-engraved precision and detail. His work is broad in scope, including large, 8-foot crystal works, smaller sculptures, themed sculpture collections as well as some of Canada’s best-known, iconic awards. He has participated in many international glass exhibitions and has been honoured with several prestigious exhibiting invitations such as at the New York location of Asprey, crown jewelers to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, where he held two one-man exhibitions in 1998 and 1999. His work has been presented to important leaders from the world of business, the arts, sports and science and resides in private and corporate collections of an international clientele.
Raynes Roberts is a traditionalist who believes that the pursuit of beauty is the role of art. It should be an escape from the ordinary, utilitarian nature of everyday life. Its purpose is to point the viewer towards greater truths and a contemplation of the meaning of human life. Having engraved a 72-foot glass tapestry of panels depicting diverse Canadian landscapes, installed at McMaster University’s Health Sciences Library (now designated a cultural property of Canada), Raynes Roberts would like to communicate landscapes of beauty, not just geographic but spiritual and ethereal; a canvas of glass that would entrance the viewer with its vision of human struggle, desire and transcendence.
He describes the ability of multi-faceted crystal sculpture to magically refract engraved images as the creation of dreamscapes. And it is this dream-like aspect of his engraved crystal pieces which he feels can express issues of human transcendence, a subject he has always wanted to explore in more depth. One of his crystal collections, The Human Spirit Collection, owned by DAREarts, a charitable organization that empowers children, depicted life values such as Persistence and Equilibrium. The sculptures were toured extensively to schools and aboriginal communities, used as talking points to help children in need contemplate the importance of the depicted values in their own lives.
As a humanitarian and artist, Raynes Roberts is interested in exploring how we overcome adversity, how we move beyond pain and conflict, in all aspects of our lives, individually and collectively as a society."
an amazing video of some of his works!
For more information on Mr. Raynes visit his blog at:
His web site:
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