Martin, like many Czech glassworkers, learned his trade in a "company school" set up to train craftsmen to execute limited edition designs for art glass manufacturers. Though the arrangement provided employment for many, it did not provide young artists with the degree required by the old regime to sell art. So, by day, Martin turned out functional art in the form of bowls and vases for the factory. At night, using scrap from the day's production, he created his own larger, more abstract pieces. Before long his sculptures were being exhibited in Europe and the United States, and in 1981, Martin was awarded the Bavarian State Prize for Glass Sculpture in Munich. Eventually, through friends, Martin had the opportunity to come to the U.S. on a visitor's passport, to work with an established glass artist in New York State. He set up machines for the artist and worked with him in his studio, all the while perfecting his own work. Holsten Galleries in Stockbridge was among the first to sell some of his pieces during this time in the U.S. After five months his visa expired, and he had to return to Czechoslovakia permanently in the summer of 1986.
The Rosol family's journey took them from Hungary, to Yugoslavia, to Austria then to Germany, where they waited for two years to get visas to emigrate to the U.S. They signed up for English classes together at Greenfield Community College. In 1994, The Rosol family became naturalized American citizens and they now live in Massachusetts, where Martin works in his own studio.
Influenced most by architectural studies, Martin's sculptures, in the words on one admirer, are "works of elegant design and craftsmanship". Made with several pieces of glass precisely cut from blocks of crystal, the glass is constructed in architectural forms after selected surfaces have been sand-blasted.
The sculptures are multi-dimensional, some surfaces clear, some opaque. The results are "monuments to light". MORE
I begin each piece as a quick sketch from a model, working directly with glass powders on a glass sheet surface. No preliminary drawings are used, no tests or experiments. Each new work is itself the test, the experiment, the first impression developed and pushed to a final form. My methods of kiln forming purposefully ignore most of the strict adherence to process normally associated with the medium. The work is driven to completion as part of a dialogue, which begins as a response to the model and then develops in unexpected ways as the work matures over multiple firings in the kiln. The intent is to maintain an attitude of spontaneity and preserve the raw moment when the piece first began. MORE
