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 "L'allegro of Light"
(Poem Of Light)
Blown Glass
Completed 1992
I completed this glass piece in my senior year of college. It is one of my favorites. It measures 16 inches across at it's widest point. It took 3 hours to make while the glass was hot, and 4 hours of cold cutting, grinding, engraving and polishing work to finish it off. The top was then engraved with a diamond point pen.
ABOUT THE PROCESS:
Cullet, or crushed, recycled glass, composes up to 60 percent of the glass-making batch. Cullet includes post-consumer glass and glass recycled within a plant. Sand, soda ash, and limestone are weighed and mixed with other raw materials and cullet to create the mixture.
A furnace melts the raw materials together. Glass is gathered from the furnace, which is kept at a comfortable 2,100º Fahrenheit. When molten glass leaves the furnace, it begins to rapidly cool and change from liquid to solid form.
Even though the studio feels hot to people, the glass cools quickly. The large metal table (or "marver") used to shape glass and apply color draws a lot of heat from the piece, as do the metal tools : the jacks, tweezers, and shears. To keep the glass moving and workable, it is heated in a "Glory Hole" (also kept at 2,100ºF) every couple minutes. This warm-up time also helps to prevent the glass from cracking.
Working with wet newspaper formed into a pad and wooden blocks allow the artist to keep the piece very hot, and thereby have the most control over the shape of the piece. Once the basic shape and size of the piece have been achieved, metal tools will be used to help sculpt the piece and set its shape.
The most versatile of all glassworking tools, the "jacks" can be used to cool the sides of a vase, draw open the lip of a bowl, or flatten the bottom of a plate. This tool looks like a metal "V" and the tips are coated with beeswax so that they slide around easily on the hot glass instead of scrape it.
Gloves are rarely worn to protect the artist from the intense heat. Work is usually done with bare hands. At times it can be very hot but cool water buckets are always available for a quick douse if needed. After I had been working with glass for a few weeks, I began to build up somewhat of a resistance to the intense heat.
After the piece is completed, it is placed into an annealing oven that is pre-set to a very high temperature. The glass is loaded into annealer and over a period of many hours, the piece will gradually cool to room temperature. This process keeps the glass from cracking (or exploding), and eliminates any future stress that the glass would have if not cooled properly.
Any additional cutting, grinding, or polishing work is done after the glass has come out of the annealing oven.
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