Transcript: Austin Art Glass: Glass Blowing

Austin Connoisseur
Episode “Austin Art Glass”

Aaron Gross: Glass blowing is just fun. It almost seems like your getting away with something. You know it’s really satisfying to hear comments from people who buy this stuff and how much they enjoy it. And it enriches their lives, so for me it’s really satisfying work.
I am Aaron Gross I am owner and Craftsman at this Austin Art Glass and we have he Gallery location on south congress, and then my studios here in north Austin. I am born and raised in Austin; I have been here thirty eight years.
Austin is full of interesting people and friendly people and then there’s just a lot to do here. I personally love to fish. Fishing is great around here. A lot of people like the night life, you know. There’s a lot of fun place to go, celebrity spotting down on South Congress. I started out in glass at the California College of arts and crafts. I went there to study sculpture and ceramics. Just got lured into the glass shop, I had no ideas that they even blew glass. So it was pretty exciting for me. They have one of the best glass departments in the country so I just got into it by luck.
I worked in a big goblet factory in California. We would make about two hundred wine glasses a day, and I moved up through every position in the factory. So I got a lot of practice there. You start at the bottom, sweeping the floors. And move up through bringing nits, and then it’s on to master finishing. It’s not the most fun way to work with glass.
I obviously have a lot more fun here at my studio making things one at a time. The factory is kind of production style. We have about twelve guys on the team. And each person will have a little small specific job to do. And the piece would just go down the production line. Glass blowing is the oldest industry, you know, besides prostitution and the factory settings. The progression of how you move up in the factories hasn’t changed for two thousand years.
Most of my inspiration comes from nature. It’s kind of a classical motif in art to be inspired by nature. A lot of my pieces are coral reef or rainforest inspired. There are not too many glassblowers around Austin. But my specialty is wine glasses. I am really passionate about that. It’s the hardest thing to make skill wise, and I spent about ten years of my career, working on nothing but wine glasses.
Glass kind of has its own agenda, which is directly opposite from my agenda. I strive to make things really round and as perfect as I can. But glass wants to be more drippy and organic shaped and it doesn’t like to take a perfect form, so… You have to strike some kind of balance between what the glass wants to do and what you want to do with it.
The price range goes from about one dollar for some of the small beads that I make, up to about three thousand, maybe thirty five hundred for some of the more elaborate sculptures. Some of those sculpture groupings I would work all day on one piece and sometimes more than a day so a lot of work involved. But we try to have something in everybody’s price range.
I think the people who are really drawn to glass are people that are fascinated with fire and loved the heat. When they were kids they loved to set fire and play with gunpowder. Model rockets things like that, its just fascination with fire that seems to attract a lot of people. A Lot of fire signs, Leos and Aires tend to love it. It never hurts to have some background information about glass; there are some books that I recommend to my students that like to read before they take the class. They can check out a couple of books. History of glass is always interesting so I would recommend everybody check that out too.
If you want to get into glass blowing and come take a class with us they can check out our website. All the info is on our website, Austin art glass. Or you can call the gallery, its 916-glass. I get a lot of people that have never done it before that just want to try it, and some of them I just teach one class and they realize it’s just too hard and they don’t want to do it.
A lot of them continue and make it in my apprentice program. After I teach about three classes you’re eligible to apprentice with me. Learning here at the studio and ultimately assisting and making pieces and getting some real practical and assisting. And improving enough more advanced things like to make wine glasses could take years, should take years, unless you’re just a natural.
Glass is always exciting and I really, really look forward to seeing the pieces that I made and that’s something that I look forward to all week. I only blow glass three days a week and the whole rest of the time I look forward to it. It’s just always been something I enjoyed doing. My name is Aaron Gross and I am a connoisseur.

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