Glassblowers bring their delicate craft to Illinois

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- Nick Scarbrough pulls a long pipe out of a furnace roaring away at 2,200 degrees. At the pipe's end sits an orange, glowing lump of molten glass.

Twenty minutes later, after being shaped with wet newspapers, puffs of air, shears and skills developed over years of study, this lump has been transformed into a delicate cobalt-blue pitcher.

Working at a mobile studio at the Illinois State Fair, Scarbrough and his two colleagues also will stretch and twist glass like taffy into long "canes." They will shape the glass into delicate goblets and thick bowls. They will add swirls of color here and drizzle lines of molten glass there.

"There's a thousand decisions to make with every piece, and if you make them all right, you'll get the most beautiful piece you've ever seen," said Jason Roberts, an adjunct professor at Southern Illinois University. But if you make 900 right decisions, he said, the piece will be a failure.

SIU is one of the nation's top schools for teaching the craft and art of glass, Roberts said. SIU has had a master's program in glass for 30 years -- a selective program with just five students at a time -- and added a bachelor's program three years ago, he said.

It also was the first school in the world to create a mobile studio so that glassblowers could demonstrate their skills to the public, Roberts said.

Can drink out of art

A very impressed Steve Edgar of Arcola, Ill., was one of the people watching at the fair last week.

"It's an art form just as varied as colored pencils or paint," Edgar said. "I also like the practicality. You can drink out of it, you can eat off it. It's kind of hard to do that with a painting."

Roberts, Scarbrough and James Riviello do their work under a tent in the fair's Artisans Village. A propane-fueled furnace melts the glass, getting it to the consistency of honey straight out of the refrigerator. The artists use another furnace, the "glory hole," to reheat the glass as they work. Saturday, it was 115 degrees in the tent's work area, Roberts said.

The artist starts out by affixing a blob of molten glass to a blow pipe. Then he begins to shape the blob, rolling it on a steel table and puffing a bit of air through the pipe, so that the hot, expanding air creates a bubble within the glass.

As the glass begins to cool, the artist takes it to the glory hole for a few seconds, raising the temperature enough to keep the glass malleable. "Glass likes its heat, and it shows its appreciation by letting you shape it," Roberts said.

The artist will continue shaping it, this time perhaps with a quarter-inch pad of wet newspapers. The newspapers, smoking and charring as they touch the glass, are the only thing protecting the artist's hand as he coaxes the glass into the proper shape.

Maybe he'll use a damp, oversized wooden spoon next or a tweezer-like tool called jacks, applying pressure to push the glass this way or that. Shears can be used to cut away excess or create a notch -- for instance, altering the mouth of a pitcher so that water will pour out properly. The artist may heat more glass and, in a delicate maneuver, add it to the first piece to create a handle or the base of a goblet.

Working with the molten glass is "addictive," said Riviello. He described the process of slowly learning to work with a substance you cannot touch and which can take so many forms and colors.

"It's very challenging to actually get something made," said the graduate student. "You finally get to control something that seemed totally uncontrollable."