Off-hand glass blowing is done with blow...

Off-hand glass blowing is done with blow pipes in the traditional Italian style. It’s a hard, tedious endeavor, and I’m attracted to it. I’ve always been a guy that paid a lot of attention to detail, and I like work that’s very involved and detailed. Glass blowing takes an extreme amount of concentration.

But part of the reason I’m attracted to it is this standing in front of the flame. I can’t keep my eyes off this fire. Many people have had a similar experience when they have sat down with a glass of wine in front of the fireplace. You can be talking to someone but you’re not looking at them. You’re looking at the fire, you’re hypnotized by the flame. The same thing happens in glass. For me, the glassy surface and the movement and the plasticity of the glass is so unique.

Off-hand glass blowing is different from lamp working, which is done in front of a little torch with little rods. It’s often associated with creating horses and ships and small figurines.

Off-hand glass blowing is an elaborate affair with 200-pound furnaces, a kiln and a glory hole. The glory hole is a furnace that reheats the glass so you can continue to work with it as you’re making a piece. The name glory hole came from Venice in the old days when they would reheat glass pieces in a hole in the ground. If you tripped and fell into it, you were sent to glory, thus the name, glory hole.

I became interested in glass blowing after I was hired on as a ceramics and jewelry design instructor at Palomar College in 1980. Barry Reed, who heads the glass-blowing program invited me in to try it. It just snapped my imagination so hard that I just stuck with it year after year. I had to get control of this medium, and I’ve been doing it now for about 10 years.

One of the coffee table pieces takes about 35 to 40 minutes, and one of the bigger pieces can take up to an hour or more. But it’s not the time involved, it’s the experience. A glass blower spends so long in the endeavor, and it’s so brutally unrewarding at the beginning because you have a lot of breakage. Your losses are great in the beginning, and it takes a long time to get control of this art.

To even begin, you first have to have certain pieces of equipment: You have to have a complement of blow pipes and specific glass tools to get you involved in it, and there are no guarantees. I tell my art students that it’s the rule of 1 in 50 in art and maybe 1 in 150 in glass--150 tries and one piece of art. It’s a matter of repetition and concentration if you want to succeed in glass, and also success through knowing the fundamentals. You have to know what the glass is going to do in relation to the heat and how cold you can let it get before you need to reheat it.

Some of the things that can happen are the glass will get too cold, and it will crack; you can get it too hot, and it will collapse on itself; or you can pick up stones from impure glass out of the tank. You can accidentally drop the unfinished piece off the punti rod, which holds it while it’s being worked on. There are any number of things which can go wrong, including cracking, warping, misshaping, remelting.

Many people are not aware of what is involved to create art. They may not be aware of the time involved or the knowledge and background you have to attain before you can become an artist. Consequently, they have no concept of what a piece of art is really worth. That’s why I don’t bargain with people over a single piece. Also being a father and trying to support my kids, I take it very seriously. I need to make a living as an artist as well as a teacher. I try to deal with it on a professional basis rather than a hobby basis.

What distinguishes an artist from a hobbyist is payment for services and the consistency of endeavor. For someone to hold on to something for 10 years and do it without seeking any monetary rewards for that long, you either have to be stupid or a committed artist. Why would I want to spend 10 years in learning how to do something unless I have some inward motivation or interest? Usually a hobbyist’s interest wanes after a few years, whereas a professional artist will stick with the endeavor, work out the designs, work out the bugs and try to get on the street with it.

My philosophy is that part of being an artist is being on the street with your art. You have to be out there, you have to attend the shows, you have to have name-face recognition. The more exposure you get, the greater your chance of making a living as an artist.

During the hippie wars, everyone wanted to run away to the woods and do their craft projects and art in a nice, mellow, beautiful environment so they could be touched by inspiration. The only problem with that is there are no art buyers in the woods. All the art buyers are in cultural centers, cities. That is where art happens, that is where art flourishes.