Art of glass

Ronnie Chavez, one of the top-ranked glass blowers in the world, will give a public demonstration of his techniques Saturday at Glassphemy in Pullman.

Chavez, 34, who goes by the name "crondo" in the glass-blowing world, has been blowing glass for 10 years and has made a full-time living at it for the past five years.

For the past year and a half he was ranked as the No. 1 glass-blower in the world by glasspipes.com. The site changed its ranking system recently and now simply includes a top-100 list.

The days of glass blowers being stigmatized by other glass artists because they create pipes is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, Chavez said Tuesday at Glassphemy while he demonstrated his techniques for a reporter.

"It's growing really fast and getting a lot of respect from the soft glass community and the scientific glass blowers," he said of glass pipe art.

"Before, it was like, 'oh, you made a pipe? That's not cool.' "

Chavez formerly lived in San Diego, where he was a land appraiser before the recession hit the construction and housing markets.

He said he'd always considered himself an "artist" but wasn't sure what he wanted to specialize in. Then, 10 years ago, he met a glass blower in Quartzite, Ariz.

"Once I saw that, I knew what I wanted to do," he said. He asked the man to teach him, and was told he would - for $50 an hour.

A session was arranged, the man got Chavez started on a small project, then left him alone to let him work.

He got a surprise when he returned and saw what his new student had done.

"He told me he couldn't charge me, that I was a natural, and he told me where to get supplies," Chavez said.

The recession that hurt so many other sectors of the economy did not negatively affect the glass pipe business, Chavez said, in fact, it seemed to have just the opposite effect.

"This industry's getting really big, really fast," he said.

Chavez said some glass artists sell their intricate glass water pipes for $20,000 or more. While he hasn't quite reached that level of commercial success, he seems well on his way. He said there aren't many examples of his work in the Pullman store at any given time because as soon as it's put on the shelf, customers familiar with his name and work snap it up.

"We're doing high-end art," he said. "It's all functional art now."

In his demonstration Tuesday, Chavez started with a glass tube about a foot long and the diameter of a soda can, which he heated over a torch that burned a mixture of propane and liquid oxygen.

He heated the glass until it became soft enough to stretch like a piece of taffy, giving him a long, narrow hollow glass tube "handle" to hold onto as he continued heating and working with the glass.

Then, when the proper temperature was reached, he raised the narrow tube to his lips and started blowing into it, and the super-heated bulb of glass at the other end slowly began to expand into a round shape like a piece of bubble gum.

Then he heated the bulb until it was soft again and poked a hole in it with a tool that looked like an old set of tongs or giant tweezers and spun the bulb as the tongs spread apart, making the opening larger and larger. With the glass tube still attached the piece started looking something like a big daiquiri glass.

(In fact, Chavez said later, the tweezer-looking thing is a $300 specialty glass tool made in Italy.)

After a little more heating and manipulating, Chavez melted and removed the "handle" and created a sort of lip on the top of the vessel. That allowed him to attach a multipronged wire tool to the piece, which now looked more like a clear glass candy dish. As he moved the piece over the flame some more, he heard the sound all glass blowers hate to hear - "crack."

Unperturbed, Chavez continued heating the glass in an attempt to melt the crack back together.

"I might get lucky," he called out over the roar and hiss of the flame. "There's about a 50-percent chance."

A few second later he peered closely at the vessel through his sunglasses and said: "I just got lucky."

That project took about a half-hour, but most of his pieces require an entire day, and others might take an entire week, he said.

"It's a lot of work," he said of the art of glass-blowing. "Hopefully, when people see it, they'll appreciate it more."