Blowing glass & inventing fantasy vessels

June 15, 2014

In an earlier post, I mentioned that Brooklyn's Urban Glass offers lower "experimental" rates in their hotshop...I signed up for a three-hour Sunday block and had a wonderful time with old friend/AMAZING glassblower Jon Wang, trying things out and attempting to aggravate some old, stiff muscle memory.

Urban shares the building with an arts center and a café, with a wonderful first-floor exhibition space....

Today was, actually, my first personal blow time in about three years. I taught introductory glass in Texas, and earned a little gratis blowtime at another studio across town by volunteering some walk-in events, but never found (or made) time or the budget to book productive shop time for myself.

So, today, even though my stepped rondelle ended up looking more like a lumpy hat, and I constantly made clumsy mistakes (like slamming my piece into the gloryhole door), it felt so AWESOME to have this time for myself (plus a couple of breaks for Jon so he could switch from assisting me to practicing goblet-making)....

Here is the final count of finished pieces percolating in the annealer, a collection of milky/cummy-hued vessels and flats.

I love planning out elaborate pieces on gridded paper, some beyond my current skill level, some dead simple blanks for later kilnwork, and some simply nonsensical tableaux of glass vessels and invented equipment. Click to enlarge.

P.S., today is Father's Day...here is one of my favorite pictures of the pops, looking through a glass. He hates it, but I think it's wonderful, so...sorry, dad!

Inaugural visit to Urban Glass

June 15, 2014

By chance, I reconnected with an old friend from RISD who was enrolled in a graduate program when I was a sophomore way back when. I agreed to assist Susie (who now teaches at SVA) for a 3-hour 'practice' blow slot at Urban Glass just off Fulton Street in Brooklyn, NY.

Urban offers an experimental studio rate for non-commission, non-commercial pieces, which encourages exploratory work and makes the studio more accessible to a broader range of artists. (E-mail them for availabilities on both professional and experimental slots.)

The facilities are beautiful, and I was excited to get a tour from Susie, who had seen Urban both before and after its massive facelift. I booked myself some time this weekend, so getting in those three hours on Wednesday was a great introduction to the open-air layout and well-stocked educational locker.

Susie being fabulous, of course. We were practicing optic twist cups.

Far West Texas, 2013

June 7, 2014

In preparation for my trip down to NC in a couple weeks, I thought I'd share some photographs from the second-to-last big trip I took (the most recent being my relocation from TX to NY with just me, a cat, a bag of Barnana, and all my belongings in the car).

In July 2013, my good friend B and I headed out in the FJ with some good desert outfits, a pair or two of crazy tall heels (just in case), and loads of chia seeds, fiber crackers and bananas.

Our goal was to hit Marfa and surrounding areas, pass through some border towns, see a star show, see Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation, check out the Prada Marfa store, exist in the desert, and leave time to explore/look at rocks.

Our first night, we slept in an average old motel with two beds. We were near a large town.

My travel belongings laid out on my side of the room

We moved westward....

We spent a night at a "tourist's/motorist's camp," whose rooms were basically open-air stalls crammed with two twin beds. It was cheap, and breezy, and clean. The town, whose name escapes me, was quite strange.

They had a wonderful little pool with fountains

More legs; spent a lot of time lying down, recouping energy

We headed up an unpaved mountain path to get to the Chinati hot springs just out of Marfa proper. Below is the spring-fed cold pool where I learned to swim for the first time.

The first place I swam without fear; the first place I showed my breasts to the moon

Having failed to obtain fresh groceries before setting up the mountain, we improvised with some dry goods and spices we found in the communal kitchen, plus a questionable beverage made from Crystal Lite concentrate + Bragg's apple cider vinegar in water.

We had a little cabin a few feet from the hot spring. It was filled with carved wooden trinkets and tiny furniture.

Heading down the next day, we passed through a ghost town called Ruidosa. We stopped a while; ruins filled with tires and HOT sun.

On one lovely night, B coordinated for us to visit a star party at the McDonald Observatory, which boasts the highest-elevation public-access road in the country. When night fell, we were allowed to look through various telescopes at planets and star clusters.

We spent a night in Marfa at the El Cosmico "tent hotel" (they have trailers, too!). It had gotten unbearably hot for me. When it cooled down at night, I bundled up in woollen blankets and laid in a hammock under the stars.

We ate a taco that, for some reason, contained grits.

We drove down a broad, empty highway to visit the Prada Marfa installation. We took our clothes off because nobody except distant truckers could see. The sun felt good.

We passed an air base fencing in a massive, unidentifiable floating white object. Even though no one was about, we didn't dare step through the gate.

Finally, the death toll on my FJ's bullguard, including one pretty (dead) ladybug.

Haystack Session 5: Glass with James Mongrain

April 16, 2014

I received exciting news from Haystack Mountain School of Crafts this morning––my acceptance letter into Session 5's goblet-making class with James Mongrain. I feel infinitely grateful that I will be able to learn from a dude who makes incredible things like this:

Venetian-style blown glass by James Mongrain

I've always been interested in goblet-making and it was one of my most favorite things to do in the hotshop, back when I was blowing/assisting 40+ hours a week. I find it to be such a conceptually rich kind of object that can be looked at and played with a thousand ways––but I never had as much technical prowess in that regard as I wanted. I'm glad for the chance to learn a little more while enjoying the phosphorescent waters of Deer Isle, Maine. And eating Tom's delicious Haystack food! And chasing the cats! And meeting new people!

Update: and I am thrilled to note that my old friend and very talented glass artist Keunae Song will be at Haystack at the same time!

Throwback to Jin-Won's class + intro to Cinema 4D

April 14, 2014

Going through some old hard drives and found these three models that took me hours to build in Cinema 4D, years ago, in Jin-Won Han's glass flameworking class. She had this fabulous way of working where she envisioned her Pyrex artwork in a 3D modeling program, leading to a strange meeting of the stoically accurate and the organically unpredictable––and I would say both descriptors apply to both media, digital and glass.

This "ego box" design eventually became the following, one of the first things I ever made with flameworking:

You can see the devitrification (loss of gloss, milky clouding) from poor heating techniques, but I loved every minute of the challenge. All of these "flat" pieces of glass were made from commercial Pyrex tubes heated and sliced open, then melted together in bits and pieces.