Secretive art
Mixing imagination and science to create glass art
By Heidi Masek hmasek@hippopress.com

The legend goes that about 700 or 1,000 years ago, glass workers of Venice were moved to nearby Murano Island because of the danger of the kilns causing fires, but also to sequester them. Allegedly, taking glass-making secrets abroad was punishable by death.

Glass artistry has a long history of being secretive, said glass artist Aaron Slater, a founder of Monastery Artists Collective in Manchester. But the secrets leaked over the centuries, and now New Hampshire is home to many budding and professional glass artists. Perhaps because of the tradition of secrecy, however, many glass workers here are self-taught.

Slater specializes in lamp working, which involves heating glass with a torch. He apprenticed in Los Angeles for about four months and continued to educate himself about glass, taking in lectures or demonstrations and relying on trial and error. He works on sculptural items and spheres that are similar to paperweights in that there are intricate designs captured inside. It’s the “snow globe-like idea” of the sphere that attracts him to the shape, he says — “sort of a miniature world.”

Slater creates a coral and sea life effect inside many of his spheres. It does seem like there are tiny jellyfish with ghostlike tendrils frozen in time inside the marbles. The optics of the glass balls “create the illusion that there is more depth than there is,” he said. The glass becomes a magnifier for the design inside.

But how do the intricate scenes get in that sphere? And what’s the attraction of such an apparently unforgiving, dangerous medium?

Glass = science + art

If you think glass-working involves a large open oven and blowing into a long tube with molten glass on the end, you’re right but that’s just part of it. What can be fascinating, as Slater pointed out, is that glass also forces you to think about chemistry, molecules and reactions of metals.

Colors inside glass depend a lot on light and chemistry.

“What you see is actually metals in crystalline form,” Slater said. Inside the matrix of glass there is space for metals to form as crystals, he explained; molten glass is very corrosive, which is why metals will dissolve into it. Heating the metals in glass can grow the crystals, changing the colors. Some colors are easier to create than others. Some require special additives to stabilize them.

Art glass is normally purchased already colored with metallic oxide. Gold can give a red color when heated. Silver can create white or blue.

Molten silver can be heated to vaporization and then applied by holding the glass, which is at a cooler temperature, above it, making the vaporizing silver act “almost like spray paint,” Slater said. That involves a serious exhaust fan and fume hood.

“I’ve always really felt that I’ve had an interesting balance between the scientific and artistic parts of my brain ... And one of things that’s really always appealed to me about the glass is that there’s really that very scientific side of it and I can satisfy that part of my brain thinking about the thermodynamics and thinking about the chemistry and it fascinates me on that level as well as the artistic level,” Slater said. Slater’s father is a scientist, his mother an artist. He learned later that his grandfather designed some of the equipment for scientific glass for the New Jersey company from which Slater buys materials.

Fuse and slump
Carla Eaton opened River Art Studios about a year and a half ago at 99 Factory Street Extension in Nashua. Eaton teaches fused glass and metal working there, and rents use of the studios and kilns. Since glass jewelry is a main focus for her, her kilns are like smaller versions of pottery kilns.

Fusing involves layering glass and heating it. Applying less heat will cause the layers to tack together while the glass retains its texture or shape. A full fuse “puddles down” the glass so that the layers become one. Glass can be bought in chunks of different sizes, in flakes or powders or small rods called stringers. You can also layer metal into the glass. Copper layered into a design will turn reddish, purple or blue depending on the amount of heat applied, Eaton said.

Eaton became interested in fusing after taking metalsmithing classes from Joy Raskin at the New Hampshire Institute of art.

“And you’re addicted, you just can’t stop,” Eaton said.

The kiln also allows for slumping, in which glass is heated until it sags into or over a form or is dropped through a hole (in a “drop-down form”). This can be used to make sushi dishes, vases, and various other objects.

With fusing, Eaton creates pendants or beads, often using dichroic glass, which was invented for technical applications such as space visors.

“Dichroic glass is made by evaporating various metals in a vacuum,” explained Eric Scott, of Nashua, who creates marbles using a torch and kiln. “The metals are condensed onto the surface of glass in very thin layers. The layers are the thickness of various wavelengths of light. These form the different colors in dichroic glass. Several different layers are deposited on top of one another. This creates different colors depending on the angle the piece is viewed at. When used in hot glass work, this film is twisted and cracked, forming the multicolored sparking effects.” It’s expensive, but accessible for jewelry-making because little is needed.

Be creative, be careful
“There is nothing you can’t do with the glass; it is a fabulous medium,” Eaton said. Unlike metal work, there’s no waste with glass, she said; if something doesn’t work out or fractures, the pieces can be re-fused or reused in other projects. Even though buying the materials can be expensive, none of it goes into the trash in her studio. Here she differs with Slater, for whom seven hours of lamp work can go to waste if something goes wrong.

In fact, Slater says you have to learn to take losses. You can’t just paint over something, like an oil painter might.

“You can’t force it,” he said. “... You have to let go.”

Glass has certain stresses, and heating the glass adds stress, Slater explained. The bigger the piece the more slowly it needs to be heated or cooled so that the stresses don’t fracture the piece.

“The biggest problem with glass is you don’t want to change the temperature too rapidly,” Scott said.

For work Scott does at home, he preheats the glass on a hot plate before he starts heating it with the torch. If he needs to put it aside to work on another piece, the glass goes into the kiln to rest at the right temperature.

Fused glass usually takes eight to 12 hours in the kiln to anneal, Eaton said. Annealing is a process of removing stress in the glass via heating and controlled cooling.

“Some of us like immediate gratification,” Eaton said, and for that she has a smaller kiln for pieces smaller than a silver dollar, which takes four hours to anneal. On the other hand, a hundred-pound “Megaplanet” commissioned by the Corning Museum of Glass took two months to anneal.

An air cavity in glass can expand or contract at a different rate than the glass does, also causing fractures.

It’s also important that the kinds of glass being fused together are compatible, as measured by their Coefficient of Expansion. Theoretically, all glass with 90 COE will react the same way to the heat. Mixing glass with different COE will result in different rates of expansion in the kiln, which causes stress fractures — so a plate or platter might suddenly crack sitting on your table two weeks later, Eaton said.

There are other dangers to working with glass, starting with possible injury if you aren’t careful with it while it’s in a molten state. The silica it is made out of must not be breathed in. The small cutting wheel used to score glass releases oil as it is rolled. If Eaton is drilling, sawing or grinding glass, she immerses the glass and drill bit or blade in water. When she demonstrates, you can see the clouds of dust being released into the water. A respirator must be worn when working with enamels, and work is done under a ventilator.

A kiln of your own
Eaton, of Bedford, was mostly self-taught. Many people who have taken a class with her get hooked as she did, and then go out and buy a kiln. A small kiln for glass work usually works on the standard 110V current and costs around $500. If you buy a used one, Eaton recommends having a teacher or more experienced glass worker check the bricks inside. Cracked bricks can cause a major accident. She also recommends placing the kiln on fire- retardant bricks and making sure it is not touching wood surfaces. You can also use small hand tools at home for firing, which are less expensive than kilns.

Graphite or water-logged fruit woods are used for molds for such items as marbles. With a hand torch, the glass is heated so that it develops a consistency like honey, hence, you must keep it spinning to fight gravity, Scott said. Gravity is also used to shape pieces, Slater said.

Slater buys colored glass in thin rods, clear glass in larger rods or tubes. One of the techniques he uses to create the colored inserts for his spheres is that of building up colors together and pulling the result into a long rod. It may take eight hours to finish one, but slices can be used for different projects for perhaps a year. It’s hard for him to determine how much time he’s spent on a piece, since preparation for parts of it might have happened a long time ago.

Slater starts with a blown sphere that is much larger than the finished one will be, applies the colored glass inside and condenses it down, adding more detail and surface work. That’s the simplified version.

Slater shows a glass sphere with a delicate gold pattern inside. The old Italian technique used to make it is called Retticello, he said, and it takes a lot of practice to twist the gold lines with fluid, regular movements to create an even pattern. “If you make any mistakes you’re going to distort the work that you did before,” he said.

Many of the techniques used to create some of the most amazing glass are actually simple, but require skill and practice, which is why there was such a tradition of secretiveness, Scott said.

Paperweights seem to be popular canvas for glass artists, and one of the best is Nashua artist Rick Ayotte, who looks to nature for inspiration, recreating wildlife and florals with glass. His work is in the Smithsonian, as well as the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester and Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y. (cmog.org). One of his hand-crafted paperweights can be bought for $1,200. His daughter Melissa now works full-time in his studio, creating paperweights and sculptures.

Stained glass, designed in NH
Also in Nashua are veterans of somewhat more utilitarian glass art, the Franks of Renaissance Glass, a 26-year-old stained glass business that has been a member of the League of NH Craftsmen for three years. Mark and Kathleen Frank now keep shop a floor beneath River Arts. They’ve been there for six months, although they previously had a shop on Main Street. Kathleen has been designing stained glass for 30 years, and when the couple decided to open their own business, they decided on stained glass since that’s what she knew. However, Mark doesn’t think they could open such a business these days. It’s too hard to compete with Asian imports. Fortunately, they’ve developed relationships with architects, kitchen designers and other companies, which keeps custom orders coming in. For instance, they create etched glass designs of new Mercedes dealerships for that company. They had an order for one for A-Rod’s dealership in Texas. They kept putting off finishing it by etching the opening date onto it, because A-Rod kept heading to playoff games.

“My wife Kathleen does all the design work; she’s the talented one,” Mark said. She was also self-taught. Mark and his son Kyle, 21, do cutting, leading and installation. All three of them teach stained glass, glass mosaic and glass garden blocks. Kyle, realizing the art world wasn’t going to make him much money, dropped from full-time to part-time while studying Computer Aided Design. He’s designed stained glass using CAD for a school project that was also for a customer of Renaissance.

To cut the glass, he uses a device that looks like a pen, with a tiny wheel at the end, and an oil holder in the middle that resembles the bubble of a level. The wheel draws the line across the glass, and then you apply pressure to break it once the fracture has been made. Mark makes it look easy, but he admits that at the beginning the glass might not break in the place you wanted it to.

The leading between the pieces of glass is done by hand, and this is probably “the safest use for lead,” Mark said. They wear gloves and the material is not heated enough to vaporize. Their mosaics are small bits of glass grouted over. The garden stones are large pieces put into a mold and then covered with cement.

Most people don’t ask to learn to make a lamp anymore, because they are expensive. A landscaped hanging lamp with a cactus was priced at $950 dollars, although even that is below its worth at four days of labor and design plus materials. It was actually created for an art show. A lamp with 30 hours of labor could go for $129.99 at Christmas Tree shop, he said, because of the way the Asian labor force is overworked and underpaid.

Renaissance is seeing people use stained glass more in front doors and kitchen cabinets. They also get orders from churches, and they do restoration. People visiting the area order custom work and have it shipped to them. Renaissance also does work in New Jersey, where Mark is from. There are fewer outfits like theirs left, he said — it’s tough to compete with the low-cost imports.