A fifth generation Californian, Toland was born in Berkeley in September 1949, the son of a career CIA Officer and an artist/teacher. His childhood was spent in California, Taiwan, the Washington, D.C. area, and Athens,Greece, where he spent five years and graduated from high school in 1967.For a couple of summers he worked with the Agency and earned his B.A. Phil.from Colorado College in 1971. Always having been drawn to the arts and independence, Toland started working in stained glass in 1977, adding glass blowing in 1984, and settling into glass sculpture in 1986. Entirely self-taught, he has steadily sought to express his aesthetic in a purer form. Ever innovative, he thrives on creativity, striving to express his sense of drama and beauty while playing with technical ideas.

Toland's work has been shown in galleries in the U.S.and Europe. His work is in collections around the world. He won the "Art in Public Spaces Award" in 1988 and was a guest artist at Artpark in New York the 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 which is purely artistic. The places I have lived and the wide variety of cultures I've experienced have undoubtedly given me a sense of life's possibilities and 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."