The fascinating thing about well-known glass artist Therman Statom is the sheer boundary-pushing, escape-what's-traditional aspects of his work.

I've been intrigued with glass art since I attended and wrote a story about a Randy Strong workshop at Fresno State this spring, admiring the stamina, beauty and and awe-striking nature of blown glass. I've since dropped in at places such as The Sanders Gallery in Fig Garden Village, where glass art takes a prominent role, and Gallery 25, where Fresno State instructor Joseph Morel has displayed some of his pieces.

So I looked forward to Statom's lecture Thursday evening, as part of the California State University Summer Arts program in Fresno. About 70 people showed up at the Conley Lecture Hall, where Statom was going to use a huge screen to show photos of his art.

It's too bad we couldn't see an actual Statom piece but totally understandable. He can work on a gloriously large scale that combines glass and paint. While renowned Dale Chihuly creates fantastical and huge curvy explosions of glass, Statom's are linear and edgy and carry a sense of heft, an approach more in tune with abstract art.

We could only stare at the photos and hope to see his work in person some day, somewhere.

Statom, who studied at the Pilchuck School of Art co-founded by Chihuly, has been exploring the possibilities of glass in art for 37 years. He's had dozens of solo exhibitions and group shows in places like the Smithsonian Institution. His pieces are housed in collections in venues such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the American Craft Museum in New York City and Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. He currently lives in Omaha.

In his easy-going talk on Thursday, Statom chatted about the challenge of glass and how his style has developed. And he told funny anecdotes, like the time as a student he made 26 cone-shaped glass pieces and then stacked them so that they happened to form a tall, curved pile leaning into a wall. He says Chihuly saw them and said "That's a great sculpture."

But Statom -- who also is an educator and very involved in youth programs -- later would further explore pieces with cones and sheets of glass. His imagination then spurred him to create chairs and ladders and tables, incorporating colors and adding shapes as accents. His pieces continued to grow in scale. He showed a slide of a 16-foot installation piece and jokingly added: "I couldn't live with this in my house."

His installations have mushroomed into room-size works, such as "Nascita" at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha.

I was trying to imagine standing in a work of art and walking through it, particularly one of glass. Throw the perception of delicacy or fragility out the window. This is mind-boggling stuff that engages and tantalize the senses -- and made me wish for more than photos.