harlanglass

PAST AS PROLOGUE

1972 Industrial Artist of Year

Millikan Jr High School

Explore glass. How it is made. How to do it yourself. Imagine! You, glass, summer time. This summer.

Indeed, indulge your curiosity. Play with hot glass. Make glass beads! Do it with a torch. Engage in this 3500 year old art form. Beginners and experimenters welcome and wanted!

Check out my 2024 glass Beadmaking flamework workshop at Feather River Art Camp this June 1 to June 8.

Sleepover adult art camp

Tent cabin accommodations

3 meals of delicious camp fare a day

Click below

The murano glass “aquarium” brick started it all … a gift from my mother’s Italy trip when I was 5 or 6. Notably, this beautiful chunk of glass virtuosity survived multiple Southern California earthquakes. I “found” it hiding behind a bookcase later when I was in college.

The blue and green resin orbs I made in plastics shop during jr high school using a two part resin with drops of pearlescent luster mixed in, cast in breakable thin glass molds. During shop class we typically made stick shift knobs this way too. The stick shift knobs would often have embedded items, like the next pictured object - a resistor in clear resin, inspired by electronics class, where we made stuff out of resistors, diodes, capacitors, transistors, and potentiometers. Long live shop class! The resistor embedment involved a layering technique, bottom poured first, partially setting, and top clear layer then poured in to the paper cup mold (with some kind of non-stick mold release applied to the inside of the cup before hand).

And yes, that’s a Harlan design beautiful sterling silver/clear-capped green dichroic cabochon ring on my finger holding the resistor object. Present meets Past. What was that Jesuit saying at the end of Michael Apted’s marvelous documentary “28 Up”?

“Give me the boy till he’s seven, and I’ll show you the man.”

from the photo roll … 1/3

From the electronic archive ... situated historically in the stunningly important and impactful AGE of GLASS, which dates from about 2,500 BCE to the ongoing present.  Glass is not just for:

beer and wine bottles, test tubes and Petri dishes, microscope and telescope lenses, cameras, the early production eye glasses (now they're mostly plastic, for example, polycarbonate), windshields and windows, watch faces, electric light bulbs, glass thermometers, early day glass radio tubes, television tubes (including cathode ray displays), then silicon semiconductors (the chemical formula for glass is SiO2 (silicon dioxide)), transistors to integrated circuits to micro chips, displays on our digital devices( such as iPhones (late 2007), and as well, all the way to optic fiber (of glass!) forming the backbone of our information super highways.  

And of course there's always flamework glass beads, and various blown work - vases, cups, and so on.

and now for the catchy jingles ....

Play with fire (safely)! Become mesmerized by the lure of the melt. Hot Glass: Get into and be beguiled by the flow.

(Downtown)

STITCHES WEST

Mechanism of Highly Concentrated Oxygen Generator with zeolite material

June 4-11 2022 • QUINCY CA

at beautiful, historic, Sierra Foothill FEATHER RIVER ART CAMP

All Welcome, including/especially, Beginners!

• 3 meals/day

• tent cabin accommodations

• fun & educational

• make glass beads the ancient way, one at a time, using clean burning and efficient oxygen & propane torches

• experience the lure of hot glass

• learn the history of the invention and use of this most amazing, beautiful and world transforming material substance

• finally, play with molten glass (safely) yourself and make beautiful small, quasi-eternal objects [BEADS!!]

https://www.featherriverartcamp.com/glass-beadmaking

Flame On!

for questions/more info, please message or email me:

ALL THINGS GLASS

ALL THINGS GLASS

ALL THINGS GLASS