Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Hot glass, cool person.  One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about being a journalist is getting to meet interesting people all the time.  Lucky for me, that hasn’t changed now that I’ve morphed into a media and retail entrepreneur – in just the last few weeks, I’ve had a chance to meet several kinds of visual artists, a law professor and a marketing consultant.

Today it was a glass artist named Mikey, a great guy who took the time to show me not only his finished pieces, but also how he creates them. 

On the end of a long pipe, he gathered glowing glass the consistency of hot fudge from the well of a furnace white-orange with heat. Deftly twirling the pipe to keep the glass from oozing off, he blew a small bubble into it, shaping the radiant glob with thick, water-soaked pads of newspaper that sizzled and smoked at the contact. While he worked, periodically reheating and reshaping the glass, he kept colored glass chips warming on a hot plate; when the main piece had become a solid bell, he took a metal stylus and poked the chips into the mass, creating blooms of color magnified by the piece’s thick, curved  outer surface.  

Then he swung and spun the pipe, elongating the glass into an abstracted triangle, precursor to a tri-colored vase.  As Mikey worked, a huge fan sent some – but only some – of the furnace heat through the big open doors of his warehouse studio into the sultry July afternoon.

It’s a hot job – Mikey jokes about he weight he loses. But the creativity and skill he demonstrates can bend your mind as easily as he bends the melted glass. And is that cool or what?