Mark & Carol Hall

www.seaglass.us ~ www.thecarolhall.com ~ carol@thecarolhall.com ~ (484) 228-1232

Mark & Carol are a husband and wife team, who have made Art, Seaglass Jewelry, and Wood creations together for 40 years. They bring vastly different artistic backgrounds to their projects – Carol has a Fine Arts degree, Mark has a degree in design. Their creations, processes and whole life is a constant struggle to question “form vs function”.

“Being artists is not a choice for us, rather a burning drive. We need to create something everyday. Mark and I have built a life full of studios to reflect our passions – the Painting & Jewelry Studio over the garage, the Wood Shop and Photography Studio in the basement. Our hands are always busy.”

Carol started painting on silk, creating large, glorious paintings that glowed with an inner light. A series of small steps lead her from working in theater to Television. Carol proved to have an excellent ability as a video editor, spending several years at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Institute and later running a National Video Industries, a post-production editing house in NYC. To escape the pressures of NY, Carol took up jewelry production.

“Filled with rules and techniques, I was originally making tight, precise work in pen & ink. It makes my shoulders stiff to even think about it. Then I met the love of my life in the form of a cocky, blonde, barefoot 15 year old boy (Mark Hall), who filled up squirt guns with paint and taught me about abstract expressionism. The result was a liberation of all my artistic training.”

Mark has many years of experience giving Carol practical input (childhood sweethearts). His design background is in theater & television. He learned to turn wood from his grandfather, a New England cabinet maker whose work was in the Kennedy White House. His grandmother taught him to work in copper and was a reverse glass painter. Mark’s father continued this education by sharing his knowledge of theatrical design. Today, they still cherish and use tools they have inherited from them.

Working in his grandfather’s style, Mark made a china hutch as a wedding present for Carol. It was completely hand-made – no nails or screws used, all the joints were dovetailed or doweled. Carol had great patience, as it was built in the dining room of their small apartment, leaving shavings all over the floor for months. He completed his woodworking training by apprenticing with a contemporary furniture maker. Their shop is now full of big power tools, which are very fun to use and make creating much easier. Carol & Mark still adhere to the old world standards of excellence that Mark learned from his Grandfather.

In 1986, they began making jewelry from ocean-tumbled glass collected on the beach in the Bahamas. As their work gained popularity and glass supply dwindled, they began producing Seaglass in their studio from recycled and art glass. Their Seaglass Jewelry line sells internationally, in over 400 galleries, gift shops, and museums.

Carol & Mark’s fine art – in the form of embellished wood turnings, live edge paintings, and reverse glass paintings – have won awards and been displayed in many galleries and museums. Carol has been an invited artist at the Emma Artist Collaborative in Saskatchewan, Canada and the Echo Lake Artist Collaborative in Newtown, PA.

Working in so many disciplines is invigorating. There is a clear design thread that connects all of Mark & Carol’s art. They find delight in a wavy grain pattern in wood or a slash of light on a collarbone. For them, the medium is not the message. Whether in the form of a wood turning, a painting or a delicate earring, their creations have already passed their toughest audience by the time they are presented to you.