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Glassworks Roaring Heat:
Hanging at Woodstock Glassworks
by Sparrow; photos by Beth Blis

“I’m going to be swinging hot glass on the end of a pipe,” says Rebecca Zhukov, owner of Woodstock Glassworks. “Just to be safe, you should step into the corner.”

I hurriedly retreat.

Zhukov approaches three long steel pipes, almost like pool queues, with rubber handles. These are blowpipes. Their ends rest in a small oven (called a “pipe-warmer”), like a toaster. She chooses one and blows through it, to test it.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers play behind her.

Zhukov opens the door of a large furnace. She pokes in the blowpipe and scoops up a glob of molten glass from the crucible within. This red glob, the size of a fist, hangs on the tip of the blowpipe. Zhukov rolls the pipe along a steel table.

I notice a disco ball hanging in the center of the ceiling.

Zhukov returns to the furnace and dips the blowpipe again. The molten glob grows larger. She blows into the pipe, gently.

The disco ball sends tiny white spots across the floor.

Zhukov dips the hot glass in a small bowl of blue particles. This will color the glass. Now she sticks the blowpipe into a third furnace with a perfectly round opening. This is called the “Glory Hole.”

She removes the pipe and lowers it again into the bowl of color.

The dots from the disco ball sway on the floor.

“At this point I’m going to shape it and then start blowing it out,” Zhukov announces.

Then she sits and rubs the glass with a thick heat-resistant pad. Smoke rises.

Zhukov stands and blows into the pipe, and the glass on the end enlarges, like a balloon. The glass now looks like a blue salami.
Again, she thrusts the glass into the Glory Hole.

She sits again, produces a giant tweezers (called “jacks”), and bends the hot glass.

She blows again. The glass is beginning to look like a boxing glove.
Once more she pushes the pole into the Glory Hole, spinning it in circles. Again she cradles the hot glass with her smoking pad. She swings the blowpipe back and forth.

All this has taken two minutes.

Glass-blowing is like painting on a canvas that could burn off your skin and boil your eyeballs. And the brush you’re using dies after 180 seconds.

“It’s not like pottery, where you can step back, look at it, take a break, get a drink of water,” Zhukov remarks. “You have to just keep moving until the piece is done.”

And you won’t know the true color of the glass until the next day, when it cools.

After the demonstration, Zhukov showed me her studio in detail. First we came to a garbage can filled with clear broken glass, from a factory in West Virginia. (“I buy it by the ton,” Zhukov said.) These were sconces, light bulbs, and glass teddy bears that were damaged in production. They will be shoveled into the ceramic crucible in her furnace over a period of 12 hours. Two hundred pounds of glass fills the crucible.

The furnace burns continually, at 2200 degrees. “Unless I go away for more than two weeks, I don’t shut it off.” Turning off the furnace stresses the “refractory materials”—the insulation within.

Zhukov built the furnace herself, along with her partner Anthony Guglielmello, a sculptor and builder. (He has since passed away.) A new furnace would cost $20,000. The main cost is “invested” in the refractory material.

She showed me some of her tools: wooden scoops for shaping glass, made of wood from apple, pear, and cherry trees (“Fruitwood burns nice and slow”), diamond shears (for cutting cylindrical glass), straight shears, tweezers, a metal paddle. Zhukov uses no asbestos.

I was surprised that the “heat-resistant pad” I saw her use was actually seven thicknesses of newspaper. “This is the New York Times, which works better than any other paper, for some reason,” Zhukov explains. “It keeps its durability better. They say it’s the ink. Maybe it’s an old wives’ tale.” She uses one or two wads of newspaper a day.

When a piece is done, she places it in the annealer (“It’s like a kiln”), a chest lined with refractory material. There the glass cools down from 900 degrees to room temperature, slowly.

In the shop beside the studio a sign reads, “Fruit, $10.” Next to it is a bowl of oranges and chili peppers made of glass. Nearby, a bronzed (glass) hand points its forefinger to the south. I passed vases, bowls, and frogs with protrusive eyes on heart-shaped lily pads. Oil lamps are empty glass balls with a hole in the top for the wick—you fill them with oil, and they burn like candles.

A wooden table had blue and red glass squares; shells and stones were embedded in a concrete tabletop.

The colors of glass, I observed, are lucid and animate.

Zhukov studied at New York State College of Art and Design at Alfred University. She began working in pottery and became curious about glazes. “I wanted to create a glaze that was just glass,” she said. Eventually this drew her to glass itself.

For three years she had a wholesale studio in Catskill, and three years ago moved to Woodstock. Her art has appeared at The White House, the American Crafts Museum in New York City, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Smithsonian Institution.

Visitors are welcome to watch Zhukov work at her studio Thursday-Monday 11am-6pm. She gives one-to-one glass-blowing instruction and special paperweight-making classes.

Woodstock Glassworks is at 70 Rock City Road, Woodstock.
679-5575. www.woodstockglassworks-ny.com.