Hot glass in cool Vermont

By Joyce Marcel

If we’re going to talk about art glass, we might as well begin with Aldous Huxley.

In “The Doors of Perception,” Huxley’s 1954 book on his mescaline experience, he theorizes that mankind’s “otherwise inexplicable passion for gems” might arise because precious stones “bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary.”

And if you can’t have gemstones, he suggests, colored or stained glass makes a lovely surrogate.

In other words, the sparkling, translucent, glistening, light-reflecting, highly colored and deeply emotional properties of glass refer, in some buried (or not so buried) way, to a “magical and transporting” primal emotion that we all can respond to.

So many glass artists make their home in Windham County — about 25 — that you might think that all of us who live close to them are by now part visionary ourselves — or at least have gotten a contact high.

Glass artists are people who have helplessly fallen in love with their medium.

“I fell in love with glass 26 years ago,” said Brattleboro’s gifted glass artist and powerhouse marketer Randi Solin of Solinglass. Solin’s work is in the permanent collections of the White House and the American embassies in Algeria, Guinea, Praia, Guatemala, Paraguay and Mauritania. She is represented by about 75 galleries nationwide. Among her recent achievements, she won Best of Show at the Crafts Alliance in Chautauqua, N.Y. She also recently exhibited with the Architectural Digest Home show in New York City.

“Glass seduced me with its liquid light, its texture and its heat,” Solin said. “Over time, I continued to remain interested due to the challenge. I always say, ’Glass takes advantage of an unfocused mind.’ I feel the struggle constantly engaging. I guess if I ever reach perfection I will stop — but for now the battle goes on.”

Ferris_1000_dpi Besides its visionary aspect, glassblowing is also sensual. Here’s how Putney’s Robert Burch of Brandywine Glassworks, a Vermont glassblower for more than 30 years, talks about his love affair with glass.

“I was down in North Carolina, walking through the woods one night, and I walked by a tiny cabin. There was this roar coming out of it. So I wandered in and there was this guy blowing a glass bowl. I had walked in just as he was spinning it out. You use centrifugal force and spin the rod really quickly and the glass opens up. At that particular moment, the glass is really, really liquid. It’s flowing, it’s moving, it looks like a manta ray. It has incredible grace, a natural, fluid movement. It’s magical, it’s glowing, it’s hot, it’s sensual, it’s incredibly beautiful — and it stole my heart,” he said.

Burch lives and works in the Putney woods, in a lovely 200-plus-year-old house that is crammed with glass art he and many other artists brought to delicate, timeless life. His studio is a few feet from his side door. His specialty is silver glass, which incorporates delicate bubble and organic webbing patterns, beautifully designed in perfume bottles, paperweights, hearts, vases and sculptural pieces.

He also boasts long-standing relationships with about 100 galleries all over the world, but mainly in the United States. He teaches glass at his studio. People who make an appointment with him can learn to make a paperweight of their own.

Burch’s three children also are artists. One is a ceramicist and woodworker, one is a photographer, and his older daughter, Caitlin Burch, lives nearby and enjoys a successful career as a glass jewelry artist.

Why do they — and so many other glass artists — live here?

Chris Sherwin of Sherwin Art Glass Studio and Gallery in Bellows Falls has an answer: “Some of us were born or raised here; some learned glass here; some are second-generation glass blowers; some of us learned in other areas and came back; some of us worked at Simon Pearce; some had careers in other places and moved here because it’s a great place to live; and some have been here all of their lives. It’s a pretty interesting dynamic. We took all kinds of different routes to get here.”

You might as well ask why there are so many auto mechanics living here. Whether it’s because they were born here or moved here for the rural beauty of the rolling hills and rivers, the ur-liberal progressiveness of the state’s politics, its manageable size, its deep sense of community and the potential for contact with many other artists, most glassblowers simply generalize and talk about the “quality of life.”

But unlike auto mechanics, glass artists also talk about leaving the state to earn their living through national wholesale shows, craft shows, art galleries, the Internet, and any other method they can find. Very few artists actually work in Vermont and make their money here. Each artist has to find his or her own niche.

Typical are sculptural glass artist K. William LeQuier, 60, who creates dramatic, stunning, stand-alone carved sea-green glass pieces that can cost upwards of $16,000, and his wife, Mary Angus, also 60, who makes blown and carved perfume bottles at $325 apiece that are so beautiful they can make you cry. The couple share a life, a home, a daughter, a three-legged cat, and a studio on the main street of out-of-the-way Readsboro.

The couple met at Southern Connecticut State University in 1972 and have lived and worked together ever since.

LeQuier works with flat glass sheets laminated together and carved. (The sea green is the natural color of plate glass.) He says his inspiration is the natural fluid movements of waves and blowing grasses. His pieces sell in contemporary art glass galleries in Stockbridge, Mass., Royal Oak in Michigan, and West Palm Beach in Florida.

“My collectors are people who have a lot of money,” LeQuier said. “A lot of them collect [only] contemporary glass.”

Angus’ pieces are available all over the country. She sells through catalogs, the Internet, and crafts shows. The couple also open their studio several times a year; they will be part of the Vermont Crafts Council Open Studio Tour this May 25 and 26.

“We have bunches of people who come,” Angus said.

“They travel quite a distance to come here,” LeQuier said. “It’s like finding a little diamond in the rough.”

How did the couple end up in Readsboro?

“We had a studio in Connecticut right after college,” Angus said. “We outgrew it. We had some friends in Vermont so we started looking for a place. We’d find a house but no place for a studio. Or a barn that was too big. We ended up in Readsboro because of an auction — we came to look at the contents of this place and ended up buying the building. That was in 1983.”

From the first, Readsboro was a welcoming place.

“It’s a small town and people are very friendly,” Angus said. “Complete strangers came and helped us settle in and work on the building. It was great. We were able to fit right into the community. Bill got on the Fire Department and Rescue, and we both got involved.”

“All we really needed was UPS to come by the door so we could send our work out,” LeQuier said.

“Vermont is a beautiful place to live and raise a family,” Angus said.

“There’s that sense of community among all the people who live here, not only the artists. But there are a lot of artists, and that’s great.”

“Vermont has long winters,” LeQuier said. “And glassblowing is pretty compatible with winters — you need to be doing something warm. There’s also the whole emphasis on Vermont products, the emphasis on hand-made things that are of a high quality. Vermont is very crafts-friendly.”

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High quality is a hallmark of Windham County art glass. Take Robert DuGrenier of the Taft Hill Collection. DuGrenier brought his million-dollar art glass career from New York City to Townshend and continued garnering international glass commissions and money without skipping a beat. Right now, 400 of his glass Champagne bubbles (in sizes from 1- to 14-inches in diameter) fill the windows of Tiffany’s in New York City, celebrating its Jazz Age jewelry collection in connection with the new film version of “The Great Gatsby.”

Also in New York City, at The Jewish Museum, DuGrenier’s custom chandelier and custom game tables were commissioned by the artist Barbara Bloom for her installation “As it Were … So to Speak.” It opened there in April and continues until August.

In a slightly quirkier vein, DuGrenier has, since the mid-1990s, been engaged in making homes of glass for hermit crabs. Yes, homes for crabs. In 1996 he filled an art gallery with sand and had thousands of his crabs running around in his glass shells.

“The wild hermit crab population is diminishing because people collect shells on the beach and there are none left for the crabs,” DuGrenier has said. “It’s a world-wide problem. My shells are lighter than real shells, and this is my thing to save the hermit crabs. If people can buy my glass shell instead of collecting shells, there are that many more for the hermit crabs — and we can make some money. We did a YouTube video about it and it got 229,000 hits. We get orders every day from all over the world.”

Still at it, this February DuGrenier won an award at the Global Pet Expo in Orlando, Fla., for his hand-blown crab shells. The award: Best in Show for Conservation.

Then there’s Sherwin, a Brattleboro native who’s taking a remarkably different career path. He’s trying to make his art and his living in the same place: Bellows Falls. Being a local artist is important to Sherwin, who paints on glass with glass.

Sherwin has been blowing glass professionally for about 23 years. He got his educational foundation at Simon Pearce, where he worked for four years. Then he worked for internationally renowned companies in glass-happy California.

But he was looking for a way to come home.

“We have the only grandchild in the family,” Sherwin said. “Now we live a block from my wife’s parents and 10 minutes from mine. We came home and my business plan was to be as local and or regional as possible and still be able to survive. I got a loan from the Bellows Falls revolving loan fund. I got a good studio with hydroelectric energy relatively inexpensively. I like being a local artist being supportive and supporting my local community. Handcrafted and marketed in Vermont and New England — that’s my niche.”

Sherwin, who makes paperweights, glass animals, vases and glasses, describes remarkable success.

“I’ve been in the black since my first year and I’ve been growing at about 12 to 20 percent a year,” he said. “I don’t try to pitch to Pier One or Walmart or even to Simon Pearce’s market. Everything I make is hand-made. It’s very slow.”

Sherwin’s studio is large, and affords a stunning view of a huge waterfall, the Connecticut River, and the industrial mills of Bellows Falls. His work is represented in several national galleries, but he wants to be known as a regional artisan. He has joined local crafts groups, galleries, chambers of commerce and the Vermont Crafts Council. Now he is trying to network all the glass artists in Vermont into the Vermont Glass Guild, which he founded in 2010.

“I’m trying to get us all together,” he said. “It’s relatively new. I’m still eking people out of the woodwork.”

The Guild publishes a gallery and studio guide and maintains a website (vermontglassguild.com; see sidebar) to help buyers find member artists. Sherwin says he has 60 Vermont glass artists in his email database already, and is still gathering names and making contacts.

“After coming home and beginning Sherwin Art Glass, I learned at a conference there was a furniture-makers guild and a pottery guild, so I asked if there was a glass guild,” he said.

Turned out there wasn’t one. So he spun one up.

“It took about a year and a half sending emails and not getting any responses. Then I’d meet the artists at a show and they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I think its a great idea. Sorry I never answered. Let me know how it goes.’”

Sherwin talked to DuGrenier, Solin, and Burch and about three years ago they had their first fall meeting. They came up with a clever motto: “Hot glass in a cool state.”

“Now we’re trying to organize a statewide glass guild,” Sherwin said. “It will help with everything from from ordering propane at a group rate to, ‘I have this commission and I need some help.’ We will provide a state map. I want to network everyone for any and all reasons. How can we market this together and make it a unified front?”

Right now the guild has 15 members; its brochure is distributed at all the state welcome centers, and often has a showcase there devoted to its members’ glass. It has had at least one group show a year; the next is in August at Frog Hollow, the gallery of the Vermont State Craft Center.

“We don’t have a formal weekend tour yet, but we’d like to,” Sherwin said. “People don’t realize all the glass that’s in Vermont. But there’s a lot of little gems of glassblowing. People need to know.”