A fifth generation Californian, Toland was born in Berkeley inSeptember1949, the son of a career CIA Officer and an artist/teacher. His childhoodwas spent in California, Taiwan, the Washington,D.C. area, and Athens,Greece, where he spent five years and graduatedfrom high school in 1967.For a couple of summers he worked with the Agency and earned his B.A. Phil.fromColorado College in 1971.
Always having been drawn to the arts and independence, Toland startedworking in stained glass in 1977, adding glass blowing in 1984, and settling into glass sculpture in 1986. Entirely self-taught, he has steadily soughtto express his aesthetic in a purer form. Ever innovative, he thrives oncreativity, striving to express his sense of drama and beauty while playingwith technical ideas.

Toland's work has been shown in galleries in the U.S.and Europe. Hiswork is in collections around theworld. He won the "Art in PublicSpaces Award" in 1988 and was a guest artist at Artpark in New Yorkthe same year. Commissions have been completed for NYNEX, IBM, Chubb Life,UPS and others as well as for many individual collectors.

"As an artist I come from a sense of design and an aesthetic whichis purely artistic. The places I have lived and the wide variety of culturesI've experienced have undoubtedly given me a sense of life's possibilitiesand richness and I celebrate that. I have no message or outrage to convey.It comes simply from my interior - whatever is there, conscious or unconscious.I don't try to analyze it. I believe in the sensibilities of the individual- I create what I enjoy and enjoy what I create. Glass is for me the perfectmedium because it has it all: dimension, clarity, color, opacity, reflectivity,and environmental presence."

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