Using heat, air, circumferential force, and the skilled hands of some of the best glass blowers in the world, Chihuly's designs have added an element of chaos, color and sensuality to an art form that had been about elegant precision. As Chihuly's empire has grown, the development of computer technology that regulates the precarious cooling process for glass has helped make his wildest imaginings possible.

Over the last several years, those imaginings have grown in scale. Using acrylics, watercolors, brushes, brooms and squirt bottles, Chihuly paints on an outdoor platform at "The Boathouse" - the compound that houses his massive studio, home, archival gallery, and hotshop on Lake Union in Seattle. He throws his whole body into creating these paintings, which are sometimes used as a literal interpretation, other times as a rough guide, for the hordes of glass pieces that now bear his name worldwide. Recently, he upped the ante on the size of his paintings by having a harness and bungee developed that will allow him to paint while suspended in the air.

"I can't work like a regular painter on an easel; I can only work on the ground," he says. "I like to work big - I tend to like big things. Until now, I could only work as big as I could reach." If enormity itself was Chihuly's goal, he has reached it on nearly every front in his career. His current chandeliers themselves are often 10 to 20 feet high and composed of hundreds - sometimes thousands -of pieces. He speaks about immense possible projects with a child-like brevity, expectant that anything he sets his mind (and staff) to is possible.

"I'd love to be able to do chandeliers that are 200 feet high instead of twenty, or a sculpture that was 500 feet high - a glass building that you could be inside of," he says. For the millennium, the thousands who pilgrimage to Jerusalem will see a massive Chihuly installation. He hopes to create something out of raw chunks of crystal to represent clarity and hope for the future. Because of the notoriety he has achieved in his work, Chihuly's aspirations, if technically possible, are likely within his reach.