I had called my friend Italo Scanga, because they were doing this catalog of my work and I said, "Italo, I've got to have a name for this new series, these brightly spotted pieces. I think I'm going to call them the Spotted series." (My mother was calling them the "Uglies.") He said, "No, that's a terrible name." And I said, "How do you say spotted in Italian?" He's from Italy and he said, "I can't remember. Let me go look it up and I'll call you back." He called me back and said "Macchia. Macchia, that's a great name." So I call it the "Macchia" series, which is 'spotted' in Italian. I still do some of the kind of transparent pieces, a holdover from the sea form shapes. Those Macchia pieces remind me of the sea, the deep sea, too.

If you put a Macchia on the table and you walk into a room it really held its own in the room. I loved the idea that just a single piece of glass could be like a sculpture that would command that much energy and space and attention. At that time, that was important to me—to reach that scale. Once I reached that scale, of three or four feet, I never felt a need to go any larger than that.

Some Thoughts on the Macchia
 

I remembered that if one was looking at a stained-glass window, the window usually didn't look as colorful when there was a bright blue sky in the background as it did when it was foggy. It's the white of the fog, like a light table, that allows you to see the true colors. I experimented with putting a layer of "white clouds" over the color when I was blowing. This became the important technique of the Macchias. It allowed the color to become completely saturated over a neutral, white backdrop. It also enabled me to have one color on the inside of the piece, apply the "clouds," and then place another color over the clouds. I could now have one color on the inside and another color on the outside without any blending of the colors.

Because there are some three hundred different color rods available, the potential combinations of two colors, one on the inside and one on the outside, became almost endless. I worked on the combinations of colors for several years and still occasionally return to the Macchia series to work on color combinations. Of course, the form and scale of the pieces grew over the years, along with color studies.

In addition to having one color on the inside of the Macchias, then a layer of "clouds," and then another contrasting color on the outside, I would usually select a third contrasting color for the lip wrap. In addition to these four-color applications, I would sometimes add a "dusting" of yet another colored glass. I would make a color chart that the blowers could follow throughout the blowing process. As many as six or seven different blowers would be adding color to the piece at different times during the one-or-so-hour process of making a Macchia.

Maybe I thought of using all the colors from remembering back to a trip that I made in 1964 on the Trans-Canadian train from Vancouver to Montreal . I had dropped out of college for a year and was making my way across the country en route to Florence to study art. (I ended up working on a kibbutz in the Negev Desert instead.) During the sixty-hour train ride, I decided I would mix as many colors as I possibly could from a complete set of Windsor Newton watercolor tubes I was carrying for sketching purposes. I was quite the stamp collector when I was young, and do you remember the albums where one collected stamps, in which the stamps were in rows behind glassine strips, allowing you to move them around the album with delicate stamp tongs? This was my clever device for storing my stamp-sized swatches. Three thousand miles later, I had an album filled with two thousand color samples, coded with the tubes involved. I recall giving this book of color to a beginning interior design student when I graduated from the department. If by chance you're reading this, I'll trade you for it.
  

Dale Chihuly. Unpublished statement, written 1992.