Best known for his realistic water bag sculptures that challenge the viewer’s perception, Dylan Martinez’s artwork explores the playful and intriguing properties of glass. Dylan began blowing glass in 2007, while earning his BS in Broad Field Science from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls in 2008, with a minor in Outdoor Education.

He received his Master of Fine Arts, in Glass, at Ball State University in 2017. He is now running his own studio in White Salmon, WA in the scenic Columbia River Gorge where he continues to explore and push the boundaries of glass. His artwork has earned several awards of recognition and has been exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally.

“Our vision has the greatest effect on our understanding of the world. Through my artwork, I create scenarios in which the viewer must question their capacity to discriminate between reality and illusion. My curiosity of perception is driven by the fact that I am red-green colorblind. Having a deficit in my color vision is an alternative way of seeing. Inspired by Trompe L’oeil, H2O/SiO2 is entirely hot sculpted glass, which appear as bags of water. The trapped movement of the rising bubbles and the gesture of the forms convince the eye that the forms are accurate. What is fascinating is that our desires often override the reality of our experience. The focus on clean, simple design juxtaposed by the complexity of the bags’ construction echoes my artistic philosophy that technical mastery should dissolve into form. As an artist, I strive to discover novel approaches to exploit material to create a lens to view our world afresh.”