Jean-Claude was French-born in the year 1943 and raised in Antibes. His career is linked to the glasswork of a Provencal village that is found between Cannes and Nice in a pace called Biot. The village is located near Cote d’Azur (3 kilometres).
Jean-Claude started his career in 1957 at the age of 14. Years earlier, the glasswork that he involved himself in was founded by a master glass-blower and ceramic engineer, Eloi Monod. The ceramic engineer trained in Sevres and preferred blown glass production, which made him an artisan. Most of the arts in galleries and exhibitions can be found on estades.com.
The making of the ancient glasses
Ancient glasses contained a lot of bubbles since they had impurities in the material used. Therefore, to make an ancient glass, a ceramic engineer like Eloi used sodium carbonate by sprinkling it on the glass-paste portion that was gathered at the end of the glass-maker’s cane.
Once sodium carbonate comes in contact with the hot glass, carbon dioxide is released by the acid in the sodium salt hence bubble formation.
The early life and journey of Novaro
The young Jean-Claude studied his glasswork skills for only six years with Eloi Monod. He became a glass-maker master within those six years. He created his first glasswork piece in 1967. Afterward, he wanted to perfect his skills and look forward to learning new glasswork techniques. Because of that, he went to Paris for further studies.
After some time, he returned to Biot full of knowledge and mature. He started developing new collections of different colours using metal oxides. He later moved to his workshop in 1977 near the factory. Jean-Claude majored in original forms, especially internal ornamentation, which is a combination of different imaginations into using inlay and insert techniques.
The making of the glass with gold inlays by Jean-Claude Novaro
When making pieces like vase and green glass bottles in 1981, jean-Claude used crushed glasses and other components to make a good solidification process. There are some flakes of gold-colored metal oxide in the mauve bottle that contain purple inlays. The neck of this vase is inlaid with orange-brown and dark blue dashes.
Adding a large inlay will give an impression of the thick frozen layer of the lava flow, creating a magnifying glass effect. The use of metal oxides and hot glass is a technique mostly used by the famous Marinot Maurice, who created several glasses in the 1930s.
Jean-Claude created one of the most famous pieces in 1980 that showed the successful collaboration between French painter and glass-worker, ceramist, and sculptor Jean-Paul van lith. When seen in the gallery, the glass portrays sparkling ornamentation and is light.
The golden luster is used to cover the flared orifice edge, and it forms something like a cloud on the belly’s upper part. The spots persist while the color changes to turquoise from sky blue, then gold mixed with brown to dark blue.
The internal decoration of the glass shapes is the top of the art work of Novaro and one of the innovative glasswork of the 1970s and 1980s. The making of glass with golden inlays used one of the most sophisticated development techniques that come about after years of research.
The portion of the inlay is surrounded by an incomplete colourless ring with marbled and veined decoration. The decoration is obtained by gold leaves and polychromatic oxide insertion between the two layers.