Marceau Platter in Dark Gradient
Category: Catalog
Date: 08-20-26

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The Marceau is a study in a single line: the undulating edge, the weight thrown into its sculptural handles, a body that reads as one clear mass with light held through it. This fire gives that form its darkest register. We call the colorway Dark Gradient, and the name is a description of what the eye does with the piece before it names anything else. The color is not even. It moves.

Read from above, the body settles into a deep, near-black center and lifts as it travels outward, warming through smoke and oxide until it breaks into amber at the two ends. On one side the transition runs hot, a band of rust laid into the shoulder where dark meets light. On the other it cools and quiets. The gradient is not painted onto a finished surface. It is the color itself, carried through the body of the glass, so that depth and hue arrive together and cannot be separated after the fact.

The handles are where the piece opens. Cast heavy and translucent, they hold the warmest light in the object, an amber that goes nearly clear at the thinnest points and pools gold where the glass runs deep. Their surface carries an ancient texture, a worked, weathered relief that looks recovered rather than made. Against the flat dark of the body, they read as the one place the platter lets you see all the way in.

What the kiln returns is never quite what goes in. Color laid in cold is a rough intention; the finished gradient is what the heat made of it across a slow climb and a longer descent. This firing came back clean, the body settled and honest, with the fine seed of bubbles held through the glass rather than chased out of it. That seed is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the record of the fire, and it scatters light through the dark from the inside.

A gradient like this one cannot be repeated on demand. The same form, the same colors, the same schedule will return a different piece each time, because the melt finds its own level and the color settles where it will. We document the platter flat and from above so the record stays honest to what this particular fire made, not to how a raking light might flatter it. What you see is the object, not a favorable angle on it.

This is the lineage we work in: Lalique's molded glass and the cast tradition behind it, carried forward with our own colors and our own schedules. Color as material fact rather than surface. A form held long enough in the heat to become permanent. One platter, one firing, kept exactly as it came back to us.

Details
Color Theory Experiments
Cast Glass Medallions
Glendale, California

Photo: Studio

Marceau Platter in Dark Gradient I, 2026.
Marceau Platter in Dark Gradient II, 2026.
Marceau Platter Floret I, 2026.
Marceau Platter Floret II, 2026.
Marceau Platter Floret III, 2026.
Marceau Platter Floret IV, 2026.

1. METADATA

Date: 2026-08-11
Artisan / Initials: EQ
Pattern / Form: Marceau Platter
Colorway Name: Dark Gradient
Target Weight: [not recorded]
Actual Weight/Used: ~1160 g glass (see note in Section 3) + cabochons

2. ACCENT ELEMENTS (CABS / INCLUSIONS)

Cab 1: Cabochons [color / mix / weight not recorded]

3. FRIT & COLOR LAYERING SCHEDULE

Layer / Component Mix Breakdown / Formula Weight (g)

Topaz (S), 3 sheets Pure, placed at each end (taper) 80 g each end
Khaki (M) Pure 150 g
Olive Smoke (M) Pure 150 g
Tan (M) Pure 700 g

TOTAL CALCULATED WEIGHT: ~1160 g
[Topaz counted as 80 g x 2 ends = 160 g. If the 80 g was total across
both ends, total = 1080 g. Confirm.]

4. PROCESS & LOAD NOTES

* Process: Slump Cast, round 2.
* Mold: first round on the silkemat mold. Supported under the circle
portion of the mold with 2 kiln bricks.
* Fill: Topaz sheets taper the fill at each end. Sketch on card marks this
as the better of the 2 transitions.
* Firing schedule (rate / temperature / hold times): not recorded on card.
* Results: first fill using the silkemat + mold technique was successful at
eliminating bubbles. First bubble-free result despite earlier attempts
using an extended mold-dry cure cycle, a mold-dry step in casting, and an
extended degass hold. This points to the bubbling having been caused by
mold technique rather than the firing steps.

STORIES ON MARCEAU PLATTER

SELECTED WORKS