ILLUMINATING THE ART WORLD : O.C. Artist Lights on Dramatic Designs for Colorful, Contemporary Lamps

When Stephen Zoller makes a table lamp, the result is more than just a light.

It’s art.

Take Zoller’s “Paradiso” for example. His lighting company’s best-selling lamp has bold, fin-shaped green legs that support a tiny purple body topped with a honey-colored cone shade. The resin and fiberglass lamp suggests surfboards, sunshine and Hawaiian shirts.

Zoller’s line of lighting-as-art includes accessories such as candlesticks with brightly colored bases molded from a real orange half and pink-tinted wall sconces created from rocks the artist brought back from a vacation in the Sierras.

There is also a handblown glass lamp, made in Italy, that sports red devil horns on its violet base--a base topped by a bright blue cone and a round yellow shade.

Zoller Design, based in Irvine, is unique in its use of color, elemental shapes and flamboyant style. But the firm is not alone when it comes to marketing lighting as art.

Artup Corp. of Santa Ana is about to hit the retail stores with “Imagination,” a new wall sconce it promotes as “Light Art.” White light pushed through specially plated glass creates a rainbow effect on the wall. Buyers can change the color themselves with magnetic filters that attach to the sconces.

And Kane-Shrader Custom Designs in Newport Beach produces a line of lighting that co-owner Gary Butler says he likes to think of as art.

The line includes exterior wall sconces such as the modernistic “Edge,” a truncated triangle of metal and glass, and “Glass in Space,” a multicolored glass sconce wrapped in a wrought-iron frame festooned with hanging glass forms.

“The materials are irrelevant. The design is important; not just the same design with a new doodad in catalogue after catalogue but something creative and exciting,” Butler said.

This is heady stuff for the U.S. lighting market, where practicality, conservative design and low price have traditionally won out over artistic quality.

American lighting has done a lot of leapfrogging in the past five years, virtually catching up with the European market, said E.J. Phillips, vice president for sales for Artup Corp., which imports and exports lighting and is involved in joint ventures with foreign companies.

“Having Europeans accept our product was a coup. Europeans are at least five years ahead of us, if not 10. They are more willing to accept new things and willing to pay for good design,” Phillips said.

In contrast, he said, it takes the American market a long time to grab hold of something new. “Sometimes I’m surprised we evolved from the candle,” he said.

The tilt toward artful design is easily explained in Zoller’s case--he’s a contemporary artist who has worked in painting, printmaking and tapestries. His work has been shown at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art and the Bing Gallery in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

*

Color is almost a signature in his artwork. The resin from which he molds his lamps lets him produce any color, and Zoller takes full advantage of it. He pairs bright red fins with a dark, charcoal gray body topped with a touch of mint green and a white conical shade in “Haiku,” another popular table lamp.

His vases are swirls of fuchsia, orange and blue, and the half-orange shaped bases of his candlesticks are hot pink, neon blue, lime green, lavender, yellow and, of course, bright orange.

“I’m not real shy about color,” Zoller said with a smile.

A native of Mexico, he attributes his love of color to the profusion of hues he grew up with. Houses in Mexican villages have orange and green walls, next to pink and blue walls, next to a yellow wall, next to a black wall, he said. His father owned a button company in Mexico City, and Zoller said he remembers seeing drums of plastic buttons in every imaginable color.

The shapes Zoller works with are also out of the ordinary. The legs on “Haiku” are flared like Japanese writing; another lamp seems poised on giant incisors; yet another is supported by curved legs reminiscent of parts of a treble clef.

The lights are functional; they come with incandescent or halogen bulbs, and some have touch-control features. But from an interior design point of view, Zoller’s lighting won’t go with everything.

“They’re pretty contemporary. You’d have to build the room design around the lamp,” said Garry Sandlin, a member of the American Society of Interior Designers.

Sandlin, who specializes in lighting, predicted the line would sell to those who are more interested in art than lighting.

That kind of thinking lead Zoller and his partner, business manager David Kaagen, to focus sales efforts in Europe when the company started up in 1991. The cultural acceptance of lighting as a form of art and market conditions were both better there, Kaagen said. Also, the California mystique is a selling point in Europe, he said.

Artup’s Phillips agrees.

“Europeans will pay $500 for the littlest thing if it’s designed well. Americans won’t do that. Americans always want to know ‘what’s the price,’ ” he said.

Happy coincidence has played a role in Zoller’s success. His candlesticks, for instance, are fascinating because the nubby orange peel texture grabs light and pulls it into the base so that it appears as if there’s a light source inside. There’s not.

“It was serendipity,” said Zoller, who chanced upon the design idea while at the market. He knew he wanted to use elemental shapes, had the inverted cone body in mind and was thinking of using a hemisphere.

“I saw these oranges and bingo! I dug around until I found the perfect orange and brought it back (to the plant), cut a hole in a board and stuck it in there to make a mold, so the bumps you see are from a real orange,” he said.

*

An architectural designer, Zoller took up lighting design when he needed a couple of lamps himself. In and out of lighting stores, he didn’t find anything he liked for his Laguna Beach home.

At the same time, Zoller said, he was becoming disenchanted with marketing his artwork. On vacation in Acapulco, he found himself doodling lamp designs.

“I was coming up with these shapes. I thought it would be great to make a lamp that was colorful and sculptural, a kind of art-oriented product that I could mass produce,” he recalled.

His first efforts were inspired by surfboards and made out of wood, with plastic fins and cloth shades. But the wood was expensive and cracked with the weather and, though he was still “hung up on wood,” Zoller finally decided to make the entire lamp out of resin.

Things were still in the wood, foam core and duct tape stage when--more serendipity--Zoller met his future partner. The two were neighbors who did little more than nod and smile at each other until Kaagen’s wife took him to visit Zoller’s studio and look at his artwork. Kaagen, who has a background in lighting, was drawn to the crude lamp prototypes stashed in a corner.

“I could see what he was trying to do. There were these wonderful shapes,” Kaagen said.

Later, the two packed up some prototypes that Kaagen remembers as “horrible” and hauled them to Italy’s Mondo Luce lighting show. Although they didn’t receive any orders, they were buoyed by support for the designs and managed to get into Euro Luce, billed as the world’s largest lighting show, in Milan in 1992. There, Kaagen remembers, some Italians who helped them set up told them they were “crazy Americans.”

“Italians don’t buy plastic,” they said.

As it turned out, Italians do buy plastic. The pair came away with 150 lamp orders. The lamps are most popular in Germany, followed by Italy and Holland. They are also selling in Japan, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia, Kaagen said.

Considered modest or middle-priced by European standards, Zoller’s line is categorized as medium- to high-priced in America, Kaagen said. “Sunkiss,” the candlestick, is the lowest priced item at $60. The highest priced lamp in Zoller’s line is the red-devil horned Murano glass lamp listed at $1,500. An average table lamp is $400-$600.

To appeal to cost-conscious Americans, Zoller has come up with a new line that features the rock sconces (about $200) and a series of dinosaur lamps for children’s rooms (about $100). He’s contemplating a more airy table lamp that would use less material and be less labor intensive to make.

Although successful in Europe, the company is still unsure of the American market. To test the local waters, Zoller Design has taken a three-month lease on a retail store in Fashion Island Newport Beach. The store, outfitted with rock sconces and custom-made furniture, opened Thursday .

The Broadway is carrying parts of the line in its stores in South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, the Glendale Galleria and Beverly Center. The lamps aren’t in the lighting department but in the fine crystal boutique. That’s because of the price tag and, as a store vice president told Kaagen, “This isn’t just lighting. This is theater.”