This is the last of four interviews that I did with lampworkers who were directly involved with the development of borosilicate colored glass on the west coast from 1968 to the present. I started with Elsie Burton, widow of John Burton who started it all in the sixties. I then talked to Jeff Spencer who apprenticed with John and was involved in the experiments at Pepperdine College that produced the first color formulas. Last issue I interview Suellen Fowler who is arguably the most famous descendant of the John Burton method of lampworking and who was also directly involved at Pepperdine. This issue, I completed the story by speaking to Paul Trautman, founder of Northstar Glassworks, the world's foremost manufacturer of colored borosilicate glass. Paul was introduced to lampworking by Suellen and the formulas she shared with him formed the foundation that he later developed into the formulas for the current palette of Northstar colors.
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Interview with Paul Trautman - 11/96
RM: How did you become involved in glass originally?
PT: I got into lampworking at Occidental College about 1974. I had a long-term interest in ceramics so I was studing art. They had a very small ceramics department. It only ran during the summer. During the winter I would take care of the equipment and run it for students. Anyway, I ran into a fellow named Guy Moore, Guy Hudson Moore III actually. He was a fellow student and computer nerd. But actually, he was much more than a computer nerd. He was an interesting, complex guy who happened to have also taken lessons from John Burton.
RM: Was he one of the students at the workshops at Pepperdine?
PT: No. He was a fellow student at Occidental and he happened to offer a free university course in artistic lampworking. At the time, he and Suellen Fowler had a sort of a romantic thing going on. But that's how I got connected to lampworking, through Guy and Suellen. I took right to it like a duck to water. I learned the rudimentary John Burton technique, and it definitely was rudimentary, and started out making color the first week taking little bits of silver oxide and mixing it in the flame.
RM: It was Suellen who showed you how to do that?
PT: Not at first. Guy knew how to do it and he showed me. Suellen was hanging out, she was definitely there a lot of the time. Eventually, Guy and I shared a studio. He had a Bethlehem PM2D that was in a very small room somewhere on campus. He was a programmer for the school and he worked at night. We used to stay up all night doing various things including blowing glass and that was great fun. After he left (he was a couple of years ahead of me), I took over the room that he had. Eventually, Suellen and Guy moved in together in a house near campus. Suellen had her studio in the garage and I could walk over there anytime I didn't have a class or whenever I wanted to. I spent a great deal of time with Suellen watching her, talking to her, and we became great friends. Over the years I had less contact with Guy and more contact with Suellen. They eventually broke up and I actually worked with Suellen. I worked for her at a couple of the big renaissance fairs in Northern California, in Novato which is north of the bay area. Suellen can tell you all about them. Have you ever heard of them?
RM: I don't think so.
PT: They were incredible! They would last six weekends! Basically, they would build a whole little renaissance village. All the craftsmen had to build their own fantastic booths. Then it would run Saturday and Sunday for six weekends in a row. They had stages and they had actors and jugglers and processions and food booths and everybody had to wear costumes. It was just great fun!
Anyway, I worked for her for a couple of years just selling and then we did a fair together. We shared a booth and I sold my work as well. She was living in Berkerley at the time and we would go down there and blow glass during the week. We lived kind of a fun lifestyle, she and her entourage and me and my entourage. It was a lot of fun.
I met John Burton a couple of times and Maggie Youd a couple of times too. Maggie was a very close friend of Suellen and her family and used to come to the Fowler's for dinner every now and then and I was there a couple of times. Suellen's parents have this incredible house down in LA. They lived right down the street a couple of houses away from Muhammed Ali. Anyway, I met John a couple of times. He had a certain presence.
RM: Yes, he changed a lot of lives, made a lot of things happen.
PT: He was a catalyst for sure.
RM: So far, you have been lampworking and selling your work and hanging around with Suellen. Was she showing you her color formulas too?
PT: Yes, she was very free. As far as I know she didn't hold anything back. Her method of making colors was very rigorous. She had very specific ways of doing it. She was not very scientific about it, it was more like a pinch of this and a pinch of that. She measured things out by volume, not by weight. I was doing a lot of experimenting myself and I was a little more analytical about my approach. We kind of had an agreement that the information was between her and I and was not to be disseminated freely. I certainly wasn't into just telling anybody everything about it myself, but a lot of it came from her originally. Eventually, I developed my own basic formulas.
Years later, I was up in Portland blowing glass. By that time I had taught myself how to do neon and had done a lot of scientific glassblowing. I had a lathe at that time. I went at glass from a lot of different angles and wanted to try everything. I was real experimental. I had a couple of neon shows and was noted more as a neon artist than for anything else. But I got tired of that after a while because it is hard to be a sculptor and adhere to sign codes! But that got me into vacuum systems and vacuum technology and ultra-high vacuums which came in handy later on in my career.
Anyway, I was having trouble, struggling as an artist trying to sell my lampworking. For several different reasons I was never able to really establish myself as a lampworking artist. I did not do figures. I was not into that. I shunned them. I only did hollow blown objects, perfume bottles, soy sauce containers, hummingbird feeders, etc. I developed my own techniques for coloring the pieces like the two-handed technique which you have seen me do before. Anyway, at one point I thought "I bet I could sell some of this colored rod". At that time I was making all my colored rod by hand.
RM: Give me the year. What year was this?
PT: This would have been 1983 maybe.
RM: So you just decided one day that this would be a lucrative venture to.
PT: Well I didn't know whether it would be lucrative or not. I just thought maybe I could sell a little bit and make some money. At that time if I made three or four hundred dollars a month I felt that I was really doing well! I was making each rod individually in the flame at that time. I called up a few companies that I know of that sold lampworking supplies and finally Wale Apparatus said "yeah, ok, we'll look at it". The next thing I knew I was getting orders. I did that for a couple of months and all of a sudden it kind of dawned on me, "Paul, you are going to have to find another way to make this glass". And that was the beginning of Northstar Glassworks.
RM: What was your solution?
PT: Well, my solution was to develop, from scratch, some melting furnaces to melt borosilicate glass and to develop the techniques for making it into rod. I did that all through trial and error. It had never been done before, not on this scale anyway. I believe that Corning made some cobalt blue glass, but they were huge tanks. Nobody had done it on a really small scale before. So there was no place I could go to get information. I spent a lot of time looking over patents and various other technical information all over the country trying to get hints and, quite frankly, there weren't any! So I just went at it and got advice from people on the various aspects of the operation wherever I could and made it up as I went along. I have been changing and improving the process ever since.
RM: So it has been fourteen years. How long did it take you to develop the first machine. Did it double your output? Did it quadruple your output?
PT: I never looked at it that way. It just made it physically possible to make even a very moderate quantity efficiently. It is very difficult to maintain any kind of color standard when you are mixing it in a flame by hand. You just mix it until it looks right. Even if you have a perfectly weighed-out formula, you still add the glass little by little by eye and you set your gas/oxygen mix by feel so there are many variables that effect the outcome of the color mix. Basically it is an offhand glassblowing technique, not scientific. So it is difficult to maintain quality and consistency. It is also physically very taxing. You make five pounds and that is a lot for one day. With my kilns, the smallest test we would start out with was 20 pounds.
RM: Was Suellen helping you with the formulas?
PT: No she didn't have anything to do with it. We had periods of time where we shared information, but our styles were always a lot different. I never had the patience to do the things she does. I never even tried because I knew that I would never be able to get myself to do that. She just has incredible eye and hand coordination as you well know. And incredible patience. And extremely high standards. She has been doing it since she was thirteen you know! By the time she met me she had been doing it for fifteen years or something like that.
So no, this is something I completely did on my own. In the beginning I felt a little uncertain about how she would react to it. I was worried that she would be very angry at me for selling any color, even though they weren't her formulas and I have never sold anything that is close to the colors she uses. But her reaction was to the contrary. She is a very encouraging and very warm and supportive individual. But this sort of thing was not her area of interest. She wasn't really interested in being a part of it. If she had really wanted to she could have been.
RM: I guess a similar thing happened with Richard Clements too because he has been down in Tasmania where is it about as isolated as you can get and his colors don't look like anybody else's. He probably followed the same path. Once he got started he just hacked away at it until he had worked out the formulas for himself.
PT: A lot of the needed information has been out there for a long time. He would definitely have access to what had been done at Pepperdine.
RM: Well, there was that list of formulas that Jeff Spencer mentioned.
PT: About that list, I don't even know if it exists. It probably doesn't because if it did Suellen would have it and to my knowledge she doesn't. There have been a lot of people since the late 80's who got the basic information through one source or another. Things like germanium, for example, are out there in many different publications and many people know about it. It's no secret. I am sure that Richard Clements had some sort of pipeline to that information.
You know I can't help but wonder who really cares about all this stuff.
RM: I do! And I'm not the only one. I guess I got it from my dad who is a newspaper columnist. He taught me that it helps up to understand the present to understand the past. Every time I pick up a piece of Northstar rod I have to realize that that piece of glass has a history, a genealogy that goes all the way back to Pepperdine and John Burton and all those things that happened. If that whole string of events had not occured, I wouldn't have that piece of glass in my hand to work with.
PT: Well, you're right. If I hadn't just stumbled across Guy and Sue at college none of this would have happened. It was a very serendipitous event. I didn't even really have a reason to go to Occidental College, I just went.
RM: I would like to ask you some questions about Northstar's current operation. How much colored rod do you guys manufacture in, say, a month?
PT: Well, it varies from month to month depending on what our orders are and the state of our equipment. Right now we are producing from three to six hundred pounds a week.
RM: That is a lot especially considering that you are only able to pull about five pounds a day by hand. Do you have a different furnace for each color or do you make one color at a time?
PT: Right now we have some furnaces that are dedicated to one color and others that might hold a couple of colors. We do different size batches and even do custom batches for clients that have special needs. Right now we have eight furnaces, four or five of which are fired up at any particular time.
RM: How many customers do you have? How many lampworkers are there in the world that buy Northstar glass?
PT: I would like to know that myself!
RM: You don't know yourself?!
PT: No I don't. And I'll tell you why. We have about 500 people that buy from us directly, but we also have distributors all over the world and who knows who they sell to. I would imagine thousands of people. We have people in virtually every continent in addition to America, South America, Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, Eastern Europe, Japan, all over the place. I know that some of our distributors sell to people in some way out of the way places, weird little places in Africa.
RM: What distributor would sell to someplace in Africa?
PT: Wale Apparatus is the one that seems to be pretty well known around the world. Every once in a while they will tell me, "oh yeah, we sold some glass to somebody in Timbuktu". I think that it is clear that there are lampworkers working in garages all over the world that will buy a few rods of color now and then.
RM: I think that is sort of the nature of the beast, don't you think?
PT: Yeah, well we are a resilient lot. sort of like cockroaches. we are hard to kill.
(laughter)
RM: I have to ask you another technical question. I can picture these eight kilns all roaring away. How much glass can they hold?
PT: It varies. When we are doing a small batch there might be only 15 or 20 pounds, but we can batch up to several hundred pounds at a time.
RM: I see. Well then, how are the rods made? How do you gather the glass and pull the rods? Surely not by hand.
PT: Of course I can't go into detail about that. I know that people have wondered about how much of our production is mechanized. Let's just say that we have machines that help us out a lot. However most of our glass production depends on the human eye and hand. There is a lot of physical skill involved. It is not completely automated by any stretch of the imagination. It takes a lot of time to train a worker to be able to work at Northstar glass so I spend a lot of time training people. Managing employees is a big part of my job. I don't know if that answers your question.
RM: Yeah, sort of generally. You managed to dodge around it pretty well.
(laughter)
How many employees do you have right now?
PT: Right now there are six of us. We're pretty small.
RM: You are a small company but you supply the world. It is quite an unusual situation. You are virtually alone on the planet in your production and product with the exception of Richard Clements in Tasmania and he cannot be anywhere near where you are technologically.
PT: Well, I have been at it a lot longer.
RM: You have solved a lot more problems that he has probably.
PT: Let me tell you that problems there are! As good as I have gotten at it I wish I was a lot better. Glass is a particularly unruly substance. Because of the nature of the universe there are just certain limitations and parameters that you have to work within. Every time you solve one problem it seems like you create two or three others. It is a continual balancing act trying to have both good quality glass and good quality color.
RM: In Suellen's interview, she mentioned that it was extremely noisy in your factory. What is so noisy?
PT: Exhaust fans. We have a lot of them. When they are all going at once it can be really noisy.
RM: Are you exhausting the furnaces or the room in general?
PT: We have hoods. I believe in area ventilation. Room ventilation is ok, but it is not as good. It is much more efficient to do local exhaust. I tell all my employees that safety comes first and we practice what we preach at Northstar. We have a very strong safety training program. Having proper exhaust, dust masks when necessary.
RM: Ear plugs?
PT: Yes, we have ear plugs.
(laughter)
RM: One last corny question. What do you see for the future of Northstar Glassworks?
PT: We are going to be supplying the world with as much colored borosilicate glass as it can use.
RM: Don't you do that already? Or do you think that there is a lot of unmet demand out there?
PT: If there is a demand, we will supply it. We will also be continually striving to improve and expand our products. We are going strong and we're here to stay. Right now there seems to be a surge in lampworking around the world and it's anybody's guess how long it is going to last. Typically these things have a life expectancy where they grow and grow and peak and then decline, but who knows? Right now, lampworking is alive and well around the world.
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Well, I think that is the last interview I will do for a while. I am sure you have had enough of them too so next issue it is back to current events and issues. Until then all you cockroaches.
Keep it hot!