DATELINE: SEATTLE : Through His Glass, Artist Is Seen as Prized Asset in Northwest : Dale Chihuly has won acclaim in the art world and cult-hero status in his hometown.

Just as the Pacific Northwest helped pioneer richly brewed coffee, handcrafted beer, jet airliners and computer software, perhaps it also will contribute in elevating the stature of the artist in society.

As Seattle residents can tell you, one contemporary artist in this region now rivals billionaire technologist Bill Gates and baseball star Ken Griffey Jr. in permeating the consciousness of the community and reflecting the region’s proud image of itself.

An artist?

It is an understatement to say that Dale Chihuly is an artist with glass. To those inside the culture of the arts--as well as to those with less-refined eyes--Chihuly has popularized glass and explored its frontiers like no American since Louis C. Tiffany.

That’s what the critics here and elsewhere say, itself quite a mouthful. His vivid expressions of color, fashioned into fantastic shapes--platters, vessels, spheres, chandeliers, intertwined tubes--and his technical mastery in fashioning glass objects in previously unheard-of sizes make his work the most prized of any Seattle artist, alive or dead.

But 52-year-old Chihuly (ch-WHO-ly) has gone a good many steps further.

“He’s a star; he’s mythological. He makes people here feel good. Everyone here, even the crowd at a sports bar, knows of at least one artist--Dale Chihuly--and they know his work,” says Marie McCaffrey, former Seattle arts commissioner and a longtime community activist.

“He is a living piece of the Northwest--part of what characterizes the region and tells us that’s what we’re like.”

The best of our artists are loose threads in the social fabric, and they are discussed most often in terms of those things that separate them from other people: their elitism, their undecipherable quality, their desire to shock, their renegade struggles for, and against, commercialism.

Chihuly embodies some of this.

For one thing he looks like an artist--with his wild-man thatch of curly hair, eye patch (covering an injury from a car accident), his chartreuse pants and clownish, paint-splattered shoes. And, no doubt, he enjoys indulging in the public theatrics we allow our artists--the kind of temperamental character who, at his own press conference, may choose to sit with reporters as if to watch rather than make a presentation.

But there are other components to Chihuly’s career that have come to give artists esteem in the Northwest beyond just art.

He shares. A quarter-century ago, he co-founded the region’s Pilchuck glass school, which brought the Italian art of glass blowing and shaping to the United States in a big way. He became a foremost influence in moving glass from craft to art, and his students now form an expanding glass art movement across the nation.

Even today, he is not too famous or important to speak to a class of wide-eyed junior high students or to welcome into his studio visiting artists from around the world. And he continues to support a variety of charity auctions with donations of his time and art.

He is a promoter. Chihuly glass shared the stage with President Clinton at a meeting of leaders of Asian nations in Seattle last November. He explores new ways of expression--including designing sets made of plastic, not glass, for the Seattle Opera.

A native Northwesterner, he defied the conventions of the high art world--not moving his studio to New York or Los Angeles. Instead he established his popularity locally and then worldwide with collectors, leaving the critics to fall into line. Today, his work is part of the permanent collections of 107 museums around the world.

He challenged the very definition of the contemporary artist--that of a solitary individual answering the drive of creativity. Instead, modern glass blowing on Chihuly’s scale is a team endeavor, with sometimes more than a dozen artists working to create a single “Chihuly” piece. Prices range from $3,000 to $500,000 or more--although one lucky collector found a Chihuly at a Goodwill store.

All the while, he seems to maintain a level perspective on success and on art.

“My purpose, glass, my vision, my style, happens to bring some pleasure to people,” he says from the waterfront Seattle boathouse, located directly under an Interstate 5 freeway bridge, that serves as his home and glass “hot shop.”

“I don’t know what drives me . . . but I guess I wouldn’t do this just for myself, although I know that some artists would.”

His success and fame so dominates the local scene that other artists frequently chafe and struggle in his shadow. But few deny that Chihuly’s greatest achievement remains his most difficult: He consistently produces unique work that can be appreciated without regard to the refinement of one’s artistic understanding.

“You really can’t argue with Dale Chihuly. His work is never ho-hum, never boring. But neither is he impenetrable or offensive. I’ve never seen anyone who looked at a Chihuly and didn’t say, ‘Wow,’ ” says Kristine Easterday, a Seattle businesswoman.

“People here tend to own their heroes, and he’s ours.”