My gallery debut

Can you tell how many Hot Glass Cold Beers Ed has been to? 
 
Well, sort of.

A few days ago, my good friend and fellow glass artist Dave asked me if I would be willing to put together a small selection of my work to be displayed during tonight's fundraising event for the studio, Hot Glass Cold Beer. It's a pretty cool event -- for $25 you get to choose a hand-blown drinking vessel of your choice (all created by Public Glass artists, natch), have all the cold beer and nibbles you want, and watch some of the incredibly talented glassblowers do their thing for a few hours.

While the glassblowing process is exciting to watch, it's not all the studio offers. There's also fused/kiln-formed glass (what I do), lampworking, kiln casting.  It's just that watching a warm glass artist at work is like watching paint dry. It's nowhere near as exciting as seeing a lump of molten glass become a beautiful vase before your very eyes.  I describe the difference between making hot glass (blown glass=very high temps) and making warm glass (kilnformed glass=lower temps) as the difference between stove-top cooking and baking. One is very active from start to finish, and you have to keep stirring and turning it to make sure it cooks evenly and doesn't burn; with the other, you do all your prep work at your own pace, put it all together in the oven, and bake at the correct temperature for the correct amount of time. Which is often like 15 hours or more. Sounds exciting, huh?

So to give tonight's guests a taste of what we warmsiders do without causing them to nod off, the idea for the gallery display was hatched. Alongside my pieces will be a one-sheet I've written up to tell my story, explain what inspires and what the pieces on display represent.  Not surprisingly, I spent more time writing and tweaking and editing and retweaking and tweaking this one-sheet some more than I have on most of my glass art.  

  

Comments

[kitchenbeard]

Awesome. I'm so sorry I had to miss it.

[John Del]

$25 for food and all the beer you can drink? And a cool glass too? Where do I sign up?