Photography courtesy of Dale Chihuly and Bellagio

Nearly 40 years ago, Dale Chihuly put a pipe into some stained glass that he melted in his basement and blew a bubble. Since then, he has spent his life as “an explorer, searching for new ways to use glass and glass-blowing to make forms and colors and installations that no one had ever created before. That is what I love to do.”

Chihuly is known around the world as the Prince of Glass: the absolute master of the glass-blower’s art and craft. His vitreous visions have turned heads from Europe and the Middle East to Asia and all across the U.S. His work is a study in explosive color and movement and the juxtaposition of the improbable with the impossible.

Hydra-armed chandeliers of delicate glass hovering over Venice’s Grand Canal. Ruby red saguaros planted on the snowy crags surrounding Jerusalem. A lush garden of translucent flowers as a welcoming chandelier in the lobby of Bellagio in Las Vegas. This spectacular sculpture in Bellagio, which is called Fiori di Como or Flowers of Como, takes its cue from Bellagio’s Italian namesake along the shores of Lake Como near Milan. Italy has a strong glass tradition, so it is only fitting that one of the major art pieces commissioned for Bellagio be made of glass.

For Chihuly, trained at Murano, it was a chance to take his craft to a new level working in such a large scale. In all, 1,600 individual hand-blown pieces weighing some 50 pounds each comprise the 2,100 square-foot chandelier. As such, it remains the largest single art glass installation in the world.

While Chihuly works in other media—plastic, water and ice—he elects to use materials because they are transparent. Glass, however, is his first love. “It is a molten, free-flowing material,” he says. In creating the organic, natural forms with which he has become so aligned, he says, “The organic quality of the form really comes from this fluid motion. If you think about it, glass is organic. From the earth.” Nearly 26 years ago, he had a disastrous automobile accident that left him without sight in his left eye, virtually ending his active glass-blowing career, but certainly not his art. “I was lucky to have survived and I’m lucky to be able to see at all,” he has said. “When I realized that I wasn’t going to be as good a glass-blower as I had been, I had no problem relinquishing the lead and empowering someone else. If you don’t have the ability to believe in people—to trust their abilities and have the patience to teach them—you’ll never build a great team.”

Today, Chihuly, whose starting point is “with my gut, not my head,” begins the physical process with a complicated color portrait of what he has envisioned. As he said in a lecture at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, “I use my drawings, whatever it takes for me to communicate with the glass-blowers, installers, architects, or engineers that I work with … it’s different for everybody. There is no set way that I do things.”

Chihuly Gallery is located in the Bellagio Conservatory & Botanical Gardens. (866) 248-7111 or (702) 693-7995