“The Pursuit of Excellence”

“When the work is completed, I think of it as my prayer traveling into the future, my soul connected to time, space, and beauty.”

I wrote this quote to distill the essence of my creative journey in words.   Whether it is craft or art, for me, excellence is the primary criterion for success in the artmaking business.

I enrolled in Salem Community College’s 2-year scientific glassblowing program in 1961. The training was focused on fabricating laboratory glass apparatus used by chemists like my father in his company’s organic chemistry Lab.  

After graduating from Salem C.C., I worked in industry for seven years, reaching the masters level fabricating laboratory apparatus in borosilicate glass. At the same time, I became increasingly captivated by the creative side of glass and started to craft giftware, mostly small glass animals. Pat and I with the children in tow went to see the work of glass artist Erwin Eisch’s exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1967. I read he was at the forefront of the emerging Studio Glass Movement.  When I saw his blown glass white columns wrapped with black threads and decorated with bulbous forms it was an emotional epiphany and I knew I needed to be on the creative side. 

The second leg of this journey began in 1969 in my small utility room. I was intrigued by the idea of crafting floral paperweights, which represented a confluence of two major career-shaping events – the idea that nature could be interpreted in a glass ball, and I could redirect my hard-won skills to crafting glass art that would appeal to glass art collectors. Leaving industry was a major decision:  I had a secure career, with a good income to support my family of four children. It wasn’t an easy decision. It took courage from my wife Patricia and me to cross over to the creative side.

I had no idea how difficult it would be to master new techniques by flameworking soda-lime glass for my art-making. So, to reinforce my emotional strength, I   meditated on the 6th Century Benedictine monks’ motto of “To Labor is to Pray” and came to regard my studio as a spiritual space.

I grew up attending school as a poor student with undiagnosed dyslexia. As I advanced to the creative side, I knew I needed to be educated in the ways of art making, and the philosophy of art. By the grace of God through technology, I was introduced to audiobooks that nourished my artistic maturity. In addition, to listening to audiobooks over the last 52 years, I’m fortunate to live in a culturally rich area that allowed me to make day trips to major museums in Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City, in addition to seeking out contemporary art by visiting galleries, and craft shows. Over my career, this self-directed learning heightened my expectations and increased my vision of transcending object-making into the realm of fine art.

Starting out I became obsessed with the idea that I could make a living doing meaningful work. At the time I wasn’t making much money, and my supportive wife Pat did without, in ways that enabled me to buy a few tools and materials.

The initial efforts started with encapsulating animal motifs into glass paperweights.  It wasn’t until I experimented with a daisy that I realized there was a visual intelligence to the design that the animals didn’t have.  The daisy blossoms suggested a live flower because the scale could be truer to life.  

Once I focused on native flowers my enthusiasm advanced with each effort as one of a kind. I connected with my childhood memories of picking flowers in the woods for my mother.  This personal response to the designs strengthened my commitment to a botanical vocabulary that was personal while building on the antique French paperweight tradition. It took about four years of obsessive focus to reach a level of skill that facilitated my creative efforts and began to attract heightened recognition among glass art collectors.  

Gradually the quality of my work and the attention it received nurtured my sense of self-worth. I doubled down. I knew I was where I belonged, by discovering a personal point of view and inventing a new way of interpreting nature in glass.

Starting in the early eighties the work evolved by celebrating myths, with human forms, masks, and different shapes and scale that strengthened my visual vocabulary.   

Now 55 years of focusing on flowers, the glass is still teaching me how to be creative. I incorporated cold working and laminating sections to increase the scale with various shapes. Along this journey, from the beginning, I was both influenced and inspired by the studio glass movement that was swirling through the craft community.  Six years into my paperweight journey I started to exhibit beyond the paperweight collectors showing my work in contemporary glass shows, this broadened my audience in ways that extended my reputation within the glass world.    

For the last 35-plus years I’ve been challenged by the poetry of America’s poet Walt Whitman whose works sparks with energy. I want to do with glass what Walt Whitman did with words by bringing an organic emotion to my glass art. I’m celebrating native flowers in glass with a trompe L’oeil illusion bringing botanical intelligence to my art form.  

To summarize this essay, with hard work and the pursuit of excellence as an object maker, I bring the past into the present with a fine art expectation, and connect my soul to time, space, and beauty.