Why I do what I do
Why do I do this? To start, my love of glass goes back to my youth. As a teenager I was able to blow at a summer camp in Connecticut . This camp was designed with the teaching principles of Montessori. The idea that young people didn’t need schedules or competition. That given the opportunity children would work on what they wanted and keep busy and fulfilled. I fond that in the glass shop and spent the summers of my formative years fascinated by the allure and beauty of molten glass.
For college I went to a school known for glass and ceramics. Alfred University is just an hour west of Corning in the southern tier of New York state. The Corning Museum of Glass (CMOG) has long been one of my favorite places, first visiting there with my father in 1980 while still in high school. I love that museum and my only compliant for years had been that they celebrated the art and science of glass but largely ignored the history of industrial glassmaking that had made glass the material of choice for the the modern age. My critique was answered at the turn of the 21st century when the museum opened its innovation center celebrating the engineering of glass .
Speaking of industrial glass making, that has been was career choice for the last 40 or so years. What started as an interest in the forming process spread to the rest of the glass plant. Anyone who has seen an IS machine push out bottles knows that there’s a lot of gee-whiz appeal to forming. The heart of the plant, however, is the furnace and the batch house that supplies it. The best part is controlling the uncontrolled and fixing the broken, the problems of melting glass. There’s a thrill in finding solutions and it’s addicting. Per Lutkin of Holmegaard said, “Glass is Life”. A sentiment echoed by OI. This I believe too. Also Heinz Glass, the German perfume and cosmetics bottle maker, says they are, “Addicted to Glass.” Well I am too. I say its all I know and the only profession I could ever do.
An obsession since I was 13 years old, glass has been a part of my life and my one and only career choice.
