For the past three columns, I have been interviewing key figures in the evolution of flameworking on the west coast during the sixties and seventies, a period pivotal in the recent history of flameworking in America. I started with Elsie Burton, widow of John Burton who was largely responsible for the creation of the flameworking class at Pepperdine University and for the flameworking methods taught there. I continued by interviewing Jeff Spencer who was a student of John's and was involved in the experiments at Pepperdine that resulted in the development of the formulas for colored borosilicate glass. This month, I spoke to Suellen Fowler who was in the classes at Pepperdine and was also directly involved with the development of color formulas. Most of you already know Suellen for her absolutely superb work characterized by unbelievably intricate decorations on tiny bottles and other vessels. But did you know of her role in this story? Read on for some very interesting insights.
RM: Hi Suellen!
SF: Hi!
RM: I'd like to talk with you tonight about your history because it has a lot to do with the evolution of lampworking in this country. Let me start by asking you, how did you get started in lampworking? What event was it that triggered this career for you?
SF: Well, I am having a debate right now with my mother about whether I was thirteen or fourteen but I think I was fourteen. I was living in Los Angeles and my dad was a public relations consultant and he got a new account that was Pepperdine College (now a university). I believe this was 1968 and it was the same year that the glassworking program started there. At any rate, he became acquainted with Margaret Youd and Ken Saxton, who was the administrator of the program down there, and he placed a couple of articles in the LA Times about the Pepperdine glass program. He also got acquainted with John Burton doing the publicity work for Pepperdine. Because he was working for Pepperdine anybody in our family could audit courses for free. He'd been having lunch with Margaret Youd and was very impressed with her and liked the glass and thought it was a lot of fun. I think it was the summer of 1969 and I didn't have anything in particular to do so he suggested that maybe I'd like to learn to blow glass. So I took the whole summer course and just a couple of weeks into it I felt that it was so much fun and so exciting to do that I just wanted to learn whatever I could about blowing glass.
RM: Wow. Thirteen years old!
SF: I think I was fourteen!
RM: (laughter) I guess I am taking your Mom's side on that issue!
SF: I had previously had a sort of children's curriculum of art courses at Chounard Art Institute which was in downtown LA until the fabled day that Disney died and left them a whole bunch of money and they up and moved to Valencia. But I already had a background in art. Chounard was very eclectic. We would paint and draw and we did a little calligraphy and ceramic work so I had dabbled for a number of years in various things.
RM: So you started off by taking the class at Pepperdine. You signed up and.
SF: Well I really didn't sign up. Dad just delivered me on the doorstep on the first day and introduced me to Maggie. She said "great, come on in" . I think that Larry Ward was there and Richard Stivers and a fellow named Emil who Maggie and I remembered suddenly when we were talking the other day. He was an art student at Pepperdine which was a little bit of an oxymoron. I have actually forgotten which fundamental Christian church Pepperdine was part of, but the people who sent their children there were very strict fundamentalists. They believed in no drinking and no pre-marital sex. I mean they didn't really believe that you should even hold hands before you were married. They were very strict about no displays of affection between the students on the college campus. So this was a safe place for people who were worried about their kids. Their idea of an arts program, of a life drawing class was that you drew somebody in a bathing suit! The glass program was nice for them because there was no question that there were going to be any nudes there!
(laughter)
RM: So you started out at the class at Pepperdine, how did you get linked up with John?
SF: Well, the program had already been going for one semester when I joined it. I know this because Maggie's style of teaching had changed. She had been very strict the first semester and wanted people to do things perfectly before she taught them the next technique. But this made for a lot of bored students so she lightened up after that. Every now and then someone would rib her about it. The first semester she had taught them how to make Christmas ornaments and all they did was make Christmas ornaments. They made a LOT of Christmas ornaments! I think they were bloody sick of them by the end of the semester. I can remember Larry and Emil kind of teasing her about that saying "now we get to do something else, don't we?"
So by the time I got there she actually had a much better program. There was another girl there who had heard of the program through the articles my dad had written, a girl named Katrina. She and I were sort of the beginners in the class. Maggie just had us learning how to control a gather of glass on the end of a blowpipe. We were just working on a National blowpipe with a 5A tip, which is .
RM: Noisy!
SF: .terrible! (laughter) Terrible but cheap. They were good to start somebody and give them something to work with but it was a really noisy and a not very responsive flame. And of course every now and then one of us would knock a torch off the bench. There was this indoor-outdoor carpeting on the floor which would give off this awful gas whenever anything hot hit it.
RM: Carpeting on the floor! (laughter)
SF: It would smell like burning peanuts or something! It turned out later that we heard a story about a nursing home where a fire had broken out and a bunch of people had died from inhaling fumes from the burning indoor-outdoor carpet and we were like, "we know about that!" It certainly was a very bad odor and it was probably not a very healthy thing to breath. As soon as anything hot hit the floor we would all leap up and try to grab it.
Anyway, she started us with just trying to make a little gather of glass by applying large hobnails with a five or six millimeter rod and just learning to rotate the blowpipe and blowing that out and we actually made little ornaments in that way. It was a very basic exercise similar to ones that John had in his book. And then once we could make a fairly even bubble we went on to learning how to coil clear glass and how to draw up a little neck and make a little bottle with a little flat base. It was all very fundamental stuff. I think it was about a month into that semester that we first started try to mix some tin oxide and cobalt and learn how to mix color. I remember that you use a muscle on the inside of your wrist when you mix colors, especially on something as bad as a 5A tip, that would just cramp up and hurt like heck. We would cry "Maggie is it done yet?". We were working with cobalt oxide and couldn't tell if it was actually finished or not, and Maggie would say "no it's not, I can still see lumps". But Maggie had this whole little routine that she taught. She was a good teacher.
I think we started to do some color work that summer, although it was more between Maggie and Larry than the rest of the students at that time. I had just met Larry and Richard. I hadn't met Jeff yet. I would stay late because my dad would work until five or six o'clock there so I would kind of hang out while Maggie was working with Larry when the class was actually over. I can remember them doing things with the color that were very interesting but I really didn't know what was going on with it except that I thought that the colors that we had to work with were pretty bad. I liked working with color very much so I wanted to get in on anything that was happening.
RM: When you say `pretty bad', do you mean that they were bubbly or not pure or.
SF: They were just not very nice. The tin oxide made a bubbly white. Of course we figured out certain methods of handling it that reduced the bubbling, but the tin oxide is a suspension so it tends to fry. Also that year was one of the last years that you could still easily get silver coins. Sometime during that period they started to circulate the copper, silver and nickel coins so we were hoarding our silver dimes because we found out that you could cut up the silver dimes and stick a little bit in a piece of tubing attached to two rods and make a whole bunch of a kind of pleasant yellow or even a bone effect from it when you thinned it out with a lot of clear.
RM: Dimes! That's great!
SF: But then Larry suggested just using silver oxide or silver carbonate. We used silver carbonate then but I prefer the oxide now. About that time my parents bought me a torch and a little fundamental setup with tools from Van, Water, and Rogers (VWR Scientific), some shears and pliers, carbon tweezers and stuff like that. So I had a little setup in my toolshed in Los Angeles and I started working on my own at home too. I got to take home a little bit of silver carbonate and I found out that if you exposed it to sunlight and then heated it over a very hot flame, you could get a much brighter yellow. That was the first time I discovered that things could be altered. You didn't just have to have brick red and chrome green or tin white.
So when I went back to school at the end of the summer I just started coming in for the evening classes. Maggie was teaching two day classes, a morning and an afternoon class, and then Tuesdays and Thursdays I believe there were evening classes for adults. So I got to meet a lot of very interesting people. Now this was right in the middle of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty and the Great Society where we were going to give everybody hope and lift them up out of poverty. The idea came to John that people who were disabled or needed help could get some therapy from his philosophy of creativity and maybe even make a living from it. He had the ear of one of the heads of HEW, and he had this documentary, I think it was "Free the Creative Man", that he managed to screen for her. She was just about in tears when it was over, she was very moved by it, and she said go ahead and write up a proposal. So John and Ken Saxton did. I was only fourteen at the time and that whole process was over my head, but somehow it was decided to be staged at Pepperdine. I think there was an idea that since this was downtown LA, I mean it wasn't like Watts, but it was downtown LA, and they decided that it would be a good thing for poor people to have a chance to experience art training.
We had some wonderful people! In some ways it was wonderful because people really did benefit from having this art training and there was sort of a group therapy dynamic going on. The morning class and the afternoon class would have people who were on some kind of disability because of different injuries. There was this sweet old reverend who had severe arthritis and his hands were very swollen. There was this wonderful guy named Marty who was a Latino and he had a very large family. He had been a carpenter and had to have his spine fused because he had fallen down three floors on a job and landed on his feet. He was in a fair amount of pain and a couple of times a year he would go into spasms and would have to go into the hospital. So these were people who had real serious problems. By the second year I realized that they were not going to be able to overcome their particular problems and make a living blowing glass because it is too demanding physically. But they got so much pleasure from doing it. Maggie was wonderful dealing with all these different people. It was a good experience for me as a teenager. I was raised in a middle class family where everything was very easy and comfortable for me so it was a good thing to be exposed to people who had such different life experiences. It taught me a lot.
RM: It is interesting to hear about some of the different people who were in that class.
RM: I have to ask you though, you ended up studying directly under John. How did that come to pass?
SF: John used to take on individual students. He had one Guggenheim or Tiffany grant, I don't remember which, that I think he got for training Maggie. So he was always hunting out other grants and looking for private students. There were a couple of people he had his eye on but Maggie said "look, Suellen is much more deserving of your attention and teaching than anyone else. You should take her on." So John said, "well that sounds fine" and he contacted my parents and I started to have private lessons with him on the weekends.
RM: You were referred by Maggie.
SF: I was referred by Maggie. I believe that was in 1970.
RM: Did John's direct instruction make a big difference for you?
SF: No. I'm sorry to have to say that.
RM: It's OK to say that. That's what I am digging for here.
SF: I don't want that to sound like he wasn't an inspiration to me or anything. Now we're getting into the sticky stuff here.
RM: Feel free to speak your mind.
SF: OK. You see, John did not take me very seriously because I was a teenage girl and he was sort of post- Victorian and believed that feminism was not a really good idea and that really the proper role for women was to be nurturing and facilitating and for men to be creative and forceful. He came from Edwardian England you know. You can't come much farther than Santa Barbara in the 1970's. So he would set me technical tasks to do and I would deal with them as best I could and he would give me a little critique and then we would have lunch. And that was really what my lessons were about. He was wonderful to listen to. He was extremely well-rounded and had memorized wonderful poems, could recite Shakespeare. He was a fabulous person to talk to. He had a wonderful philosophy and I do agree with Jeff. His theory that man has an innate need to express himself in a creative fashion had a very egalitarian twist to it. He felt that just good craftsmanship as a carpenter was creative. Working with your hands and your mind has a kind of growing and healing effect on the regular neurosis that we are all heir to.
RM: That makes sense to a certain extent, but you wonder what happened to people like Gauguin. There have been downright evil people who were great artists.
SF: I guess that's true, I don't know.
RM: There's an exception to every theory I suppose. But actually I do agree that there is a creative side to everybody. I think that John's main contribution was that he inspired so many people to be that way.
SF: What he was doing was sort of translating for a new generation and a modern American audience the William Morris and John Ruskin school of esthetics and craftsmanship. I wasn't aware of those kinds of things until I met John and was exposed to them. So there was a sort of liberal arts quality to the whole experience. Even though I was not taken terribly seriously by him, and I think I had gotten to a stage where technical guidance wasn't what I needed from him. Still, the liberal arts quality to the lessons and just being around him, that in itself was very valuable and inspiring.
RM: That is very interesting that John was such an influence on you, but not necessarily in a technical manner. I want to ask you about the other people you were involved with on a daily basis, people like Maggie Youd, Larry Ward, and Rich Stivers. I guess they were in the class from the very beginning and all the way through until the very end, weren't they?
SF: Yes, and actually beyond the end of my participation. I really was only involved for three or four years at the workshop in Pepperdine. After Maggie's accident, I guess I sort of dropped out. I was working on my own more at that time anyway. It's a little blurry trying to pinpoint what I was trying to do at any given time, but I would say that Maggie had a lot of influence on how I approached my work in that she was quite a stickler for technical excellence. She was a bit of a perfectionist.
RM: I see that in your work.
SF: Well, yes, but sometimes the argument was made that it was stultifying. But she had a pretty good point that you get more freedom in some ways if you are very proficient, more freedom in expressing yourself and pushing back the boundaries, the physical limitations of what the glass will do. I think you would know that, Robbin.
RM: Absolutely. I am nodding my head in agreement.
SF: One of the best things that helped me was that after I had been blowing glass for three or four months I became to some degree a teaching assistant to Maggie. There were people who came in and were new and did not have any of the basics. I was technically proficient enough to help them when their little bubble was flopping over on its neck. Maggie did not make me do this when I was working, but when I was free she would boot me over there and have me try to resurrect things. I learned an awful lot from trying to resurrect people's mistakes. It wasn't helping them a lot, but it was helping me an awful lot! Eventually, I had to stop and they had to learn to resurrect their own mistakes, but I got very good at working things over for people who had really gotten themselves into a jam.
RM: How did Larry first come up with the idea of using germanium?
SF: It was Larry's second year in the glass shop when I started and I think he was just starting to read up on the different oxides that are used in coloring soft glass and he was starting to come up with ideas of what would work in Pyrex. Because he was a chemistry major, he was able to examine what borosilicate glass was composed of and make some guesses as to what would work with it chemically.
I think probably it was toward the end of that September when Larry produced Ruby Red. My memory was that the copper and germanium combination for the ruby red was the very first thing to emerge. A while ago, I talked to Jim Lundberg before he passed away, and he asked me about the ruby red. I explained what it was and I said that I didn't know why it worked. Germanium mixed up by itself over a torch is clear bubbles. That's it, there's nothing in it. But he told me that copper has a very dense molecular structure and when you introduce an agent that spaces it out the light is able to pass through it and make this solid copper-red a translucent red. That's where you get that nice ruby from. That is what he told me and it sounded kind of plausible.
One of the reasons I got into the color-making was that I was sort of a gopher. Larry had previously devised a red that was composed of cobalt, copper, and iron oxide. You could get a lovely wine-red color. The rod would be sort of steel-blue color and the tips would strike back wine red. It was gorgeous! But it took forever to mix. It would take twenty or thirty minutes to produce one stick of color. I was an available grunt to do that kind of work while we fiddled with the rest of it. That taught me something too. It taught me to use different kinds of heat to produce different effects. Larry and I used to argue about my techniques of mixing color, He did not like my color mixing technique! What he liked to do was to take a big piece of _" rod and attach a couple of half-inch rods so that he had a smaller handle that was easier to manipulate. He would take a piece of tubing and heavily load it with some formula and work it down and thin it out by feeding in the _" rod. He was into working massive amounts of color at once. Considering that he was doing this over a National blowpipe.
(laughter)
RM: Man! I'll bet it was noisy in that place!
SF: Oh yeah, it was so loud. I think it affected my hearing. (laughter) So anyway we had this one formula for this wine red and I still have a couple of pieces that was made with it. I should go back and try it again. It would be interesting to see what it would do. But to Larry's mind it was an awful lot of work for not a lot of return. So he continued to do some research at the library and he came up with germanium. If what Lundberg said was correct, that is probably why germanium works. So having discovered the ruby red we sort of backtracked and took another look at the problem of cobalt oxide. I don't know if you have ever noticed this but if you mix it in too much of a reductive flame it will get kind of this lead haze on it, a kind of grayish haze.
RM: Yes, I have noticed.
SF: That's because you really have to oxidize cobalt and I don't think it is good to work it in really dense concentrations. I think you get too much reduction in the interior of the gather of glass. So we thought that maybe germanium would help eliminate that problem. So we tried to mix the germanium in with the cobalt and it didn't do a darn bit of good. In retrospect, looking back on it, I think in the original wine-red that Larry came up with the iron was providing the heat sensitive qualities and the cobalt was sort of doing the spacing of the copper oxide molecules. People will probably be calling you and saying "what is she talking about?" but that's what I think is happening. I think the cobalt is acting as a spacer because its character doesn't change. Once you start to dilute it, it continues to be a certain quality of blue. It stays translucent.
So basically I guess I started to do some of the work with the color at the end of the first summer. It sort of runs together in my memory as to when one step led to another.
RM: So you were basically their color mixer?
SF: Well, I was one of the color mixers. Larry and Richard were very much into working on color.
RM: Was this like a production line where they would put together a color formula and then have the mixers make it or.?
SF: No. We were more individuals working informally and cooperatively. We were just trying to solve problems of how to get different hues, how to enlarge the palette because John's list of oxides in his book was so limited (John even augmented what he used by having some of those uranium yellow and black neon tubes to work with.) For example, once I had the information about which chemicals were useful and relatively noon-toxic, it was a matter of my thinking up combinations of oxides in what seemed to be logical proportions, and then experimenting. I'd mix up batches of a color of varying intensities. Then I'd make a few pieces with the test color so that I could see the effects it produced. Then I'd develop variations by tweaking the proportions of different oxides.
I've continued this research since then over the past twenty-four years, refining my color-making techniques. I've extended my working palette with several new formulas and variations of the formulas I worked on at Pepperdine.
Anyway, Larry would look at what we were doing and he would try to figure out from reading up in chemistry books what would give us some different types of colors and he would also try to figure out what the toxicity would be. While we were working with the germanium we were also working with potassium permanganate crystals mixed with cobalt, which unfortunately was not stable. It would crack about a third the time. But you could get a beautiful deep eggplant violet effect from that. The potassium permanganate crystals would fume like mad. We would grind them up in a little mortar and pestle with cobalt. Our idea of ventilation at that time was to hold your breath! (laughter) This was our safety thing. Larry would say "while it's fuming, just take a deep breath.uuuuuhhhhhp!"
RM: Safety first! (laughter)
SF: .get a real hot flame, mix it as fast as you can, and then kind of lean back away from the torch and go aaahhhhhh!
(extended laughter)
RM: Oh that's wild. I love it.
SF: I think that when we got into the more dangerous stuff was when we were fooling around with selenium dioxide and tellurium dioxide. You could get wonderful silvery icy blue-greens and a beautiful translucent root beer brown. You could mix it with cobalt and get different effects. I did work with that stuff for maybe a year or so. The thing was with the tellurium that you could tell it was in your system because you would get kind of a salami breath from mixing it. Larry's rule of thumb was that if you started to get the salami breath you had better stop. You could smell it when you were mixing it and then it would get into your blood I guess through your respiratory system just like when you drink and you smell like wine. That was the point when he felt you had too much exposure and you should stop working with it. He had some theory about drinking milk but I don't think there was much to that.
RM: Milk?!
SF: Yes, I don't know what milk was supposed to do. He probably thought it would bind the toxin somehow.
RM: Well, he was a safety conscious guy that Larry. Hold your breath! Drink milk!! (laughter)
SF: No really, we were just maniacs. Larry felt the germanium was probably pretty safe because one of the things that germanium is used for is for reconstituting plasma. So he felt there was not too much to worry about in terms of toxicity from exposure to it. When I started to do more work independently with the germanium formulas I got out of using the tellurium and selenium feeling that it was not worth that kind of risk. Also we were just getting information from the environmental movement about selenium kills in the central valley and places like that. So a lot of people sort of backed away from it after that. I suppose if you had a really good industrial ventilation system along with a super-good vapor mask you could probably work with it in relative safety. But I have other things to work with that I think are fine so I haven't gone back to it. I already had all the initial oxides that were set out in John's book and when we found out about the germanium I just ordered some from the Wilshire chemical company. You could order all these things. Nobody ever batted an eye or told you that you had to have any kind of permit to buy that stuff. So we just ordered stuff whenever new information came our way. If my memory serves me correctly, I think I can safely say that I was the first person to decide that there should be some combination of silver and germanium that would have a good effect and that was my first really good changing color with an opaque quality to it.
RM: Silver and germanium together?
SF: Yes, silver and germanium. In concentration it was fantastic!
RM: Ok, at this point, you have a setup at home, but you are attending classes so you are going back and forth. After Maggie's accident, you stopped going to the school?
RM: Well Maggie's accident happened in 1971. It was that summer that she took off on a vacation and I kept the workshop open on my own with Ken Saxton overseeing on a day-to-day basis. Larry was coming in and Richard Stivers too because he didn't have a setup outside of the classes. He was either there or at Jeff's (Spencer) house. So I kept the workshop open while Maggie was away on a month's vacation. When she came back the fall semester started and I went back to going to the evening classes and worked at home the rest of the time.
Maggie was coming to our house for dinner during the holidays when she had her accident. She had a cute little Datsun sportscar that she was very fond of. She was waiting to make a turn and somebody plowed into her. She was hit from the left side and was very severely injured. We were waiting for her to start dinner when my dad got a phone call from Daniel Freidman Hospital in Inglewood. He had to go down there and sign a release so that they could do some surgery on her to remove glass from her face. She had a very severe cut to her eye that affected the muscle, that affected the vision in her left eye. When she finally got out of the hospital she had permanent double vision, kind of a horizontal, up-and-down thing.
So dad went down to the hospital and signed the release forms and came back and was very unhappy. He said the trauma nurse had been crying and he said that he had never seen a trauma nurse cry before so he suspected that Maggie was not in very good shape. He called Elsie (Burton) and she came down and sort of took over at that point. That was in late '71 around the holidays. Maggie had to go back to England so she could get back on National Health for a year and be seen by a neurologist. In the meantime, Richard Stivers took over teaching the class along with Ken Saxton. I was in and out a little bit but I was mainly working at home and going up to have lessons with John at that point. When Maggie came back about a year later she went back to her apartment in Englewood that John and Elsie had been keeping up for her. We both went back to Pepperdine and tried to work on regaining her skills and her dexterity. She was too shot to teach. It was such a severe concussion that it left her very emotionally scrambled. She didn't have a lot of patience and was still very easily fatigued even though it had been over a year. It was a really awful accident. It is hard to imagine what it would be like to have to fight with those kinds of things. I think it was very hard for her seeing her old work and how beautiful and precise her technique was and to have to go back to square one and to have the handicap of her vision on top of it.
So I went back to Pepperdine a fair amount to try and help her recover some of her capacity. That was in 1972 and I believe the program ran out of funding around 1973. At that point I believe Pepperdine was starting to make its move to Malibu. I think they had received a grant of land from the Adamson family and were making their plans to break ground there. So I think that '73 was probably the end of the program.
RM: I see. You haven't mentioned Jeff very much. Did you not see that much of him?
SF: I think it was the second class I took, Maggie said there was a wonderful young glassblower named Jeff Spencer who was doing some work with John and he would be coming in and out of the workshop. I think that what happened was that John said that he thought that Jeff should be allowed to come into the workshop and do demonstrations now and then and that's about the level of his participation that I saw. I can remember seeing him do demonstrations that were very nice. I can remember him coming in and mixing up a color, doing some heavily loaded rods and then taking them away to do stuff.
I wanted to say something about Richard Stivers who has not been spoken of a whole lot. He was a wonderful glassblower too. He had been working about a year longer than me and he had a very wonderful facility with the glass and did a lot of working with color and had a very distinctive style to his work. He worked with a lot of real dark, intense, contrasting colors and did nice perfume bottles. There was a spell there when he was doing some really nice hobnailed ornaments. There was a joint show of John Burton and his students at the Santa Barbara Art Museum in, I believe 1970. We did a little demonstration there while that was going on which was kind of fun. The show was mainly John's work but there was a display case for me and one for Jeff and one for Maggie and one for Richard and a joint display case for the other students.
There was a film made around 1971 that was shown on PBS called "Harvest of Creative Hands" which Ken Saxton thought was a very unfortunate title. He had this image of a harvester full of disembodied hands. (laughter) Anyway, it was an hour-long documentary about different glassblowers, students at Pepperdine that John had helped train and inspire. We all blew a little piece of glass and made a little speech and talked about our different experiences and stuff. There was also an extensive segment showing Jeff Spencer training on his bike getting ready for the Olympics. I don't know what happened to that film. It is probably pretty primitive by today's standards.
RM: I may have a line through Elsie to get a copy of that film. I would very much like to see it. I would like to ask you now though, how did you meet Paul Trautman?
SF: Well let's see. That's a few years on. I started to devote my entire energy to blowing glass. I was selling my work in galleries from about the age of sixteen or seventeen and starting to be somewhat self-supporting. When I was nineteen I met another student of John's, a fellow named Guy Moore, and he became my boyfriend. He was programming computers at Occidental College at that time. He was a second-year student at Occidental College, which is in Eagle Rock, California. We were living together and I was blowing glass seriously trying to make a living. He was kind of fooling around in the chemistry department and he somehow got permission to put on an evening class on glassblowing fundamentals in their chemistry lab. They had all the gas outlets and we were able to scrounge up a bunch of torches. He got a bunch of his buddies enrolled in it and one of them was Paul Trautman. Paul was a philosophy major at Occidental at the time and was taking a minor in art and was a pretty accomplished ceramist. He had a really good grasp of handling moving material. So Guy started this course, and I don't remember how this happened, but I was teaching it. At first he said that I could just come in and assist, but after the first night, he would just come in and open the lab up and I would teach the course, do different demonstrations and instruct all these cute college students how to blow glass. He would go back to the computer room and work on the computer. So I ended up teaching the class. Now if he ever reads this he may disagree and claim that he had more to do with it but I don't remember that.
So Paul was one of the students and he really enjoyed doing it. He would drop by on his bicycle and visit me in my garage and I would do demonstrations for him. I was very impressed with his ceramics and with his capacity for working with glass. He was a pretty quick study really, when you think about it. At one point, he took a year off and when he came back to Occidental he got really serious about his philosophy studies. He also ran the ceramics department and got his own setup and started blowing glass. He would come and visit me and we would talk about color, mixing different colors and trying things out. That was in 1974. I guess it was from 1974 to 1976 that we were really paling around together and I was sharing information with him about color. After he got his degree he moved back up to Oregon. He came down occasionally to visit me and we did a couple of Renaissance fairs together. I think at that point he was making glass for sale and finding that was not a steady enough income. He is quite a problem solver and he got the idea of how to mass-produce some good borosilicate color rods. At first he was mixing by hand and then got into manufacturing it. Initially he was using pretty basic formulas that I had shared with him but as he got into the production end of it he discovered a lot of things that had to be done differently. You can't just melt all of this stuff in a pot and have it work out. There are chemical additives and other elements that go into producing Northstar colored glass that I am very impressed with and don't know anything about. I really am impressed with the work he has done and feel that he has taken it to a new level in terms of being able to provide people with a lot of color in I think a pretty cost-effective manner, especially compared to the way I make color. Since I am trying to produce art glass and my emphasis is on color, I have to invest a lot of time and energy in the pieces of color that I am going to work with. I am not just fumbling around in the dark. I know where I want to go with a piece when I start it and part of having control over that is having very good color and having control over what each little piece of color is going to do.
RM: So he started with what you taught him, but then when he was faced with having to produce them on a massive scale he had to revise them so that they could be batched. That is the reason that Northstar colors are the way they are, because of the way they have to be made.
SF: Yes, it just was not cost-effective to have to hand-mix everything. To be able to mix in the quantities to batch it he had to make some additions and alterations to the formulas.
RM: Which continues to this day.
SF: Yeah, well he is always trying to find some agent that will both cut costs and improve the color at the same time. It still has to remain a quality product or he can't sell it obviously. But it is always nice when you can reduce expensive chemicals and have some agent that functions and does well. I mean, I have vents, but he has great big industrial hoods that sound like a 747 taking off when his studio gets going!
RM: I have never been there but I have heard some stories about his factory!
SF: I am not sure that everybody shouldn't be wearing earmuffs in there. It is really loud. RM: I am going to get to see it someday. Well, we have reached the end of our allotted time here. Is there anything else you want to add to this story? What are your plans for the future?
SF: I just want to do art glass. I am extremely happy blowing glass and working with the color and trying to maintain a balance between making a living with a commercial product and still trying to sustain the creative aspect of it. The only thing I wish was that I had a little less pressure in terms of having to produce commercial art glass and had a little more time to fool around myself.
RM: Well you know the answer to that but I won't say it because you and I have been down that road before, Suellen! (laughter)