Dan Friday Guest Artist Demonstration

so working with the team this afternoon so Dan Friday's the guy at the bench there with the white glove on tailors the guy with the glasses Jorge canards they're standing George would you wave your hand and George is part of our team here my name is Jeff this is Eric's knee he's going to start emceeing here in just a moment and also Dan has a friend here on another glass artist penny ray Cove and she's backstage right now doing some social media posts for Dan we're going to be live-streaming here in just a moment and we also will be taking questions from our viewers online but here's Eric's need to take away the MC thanks a lot Jeff let's have a big round of applause for our team up here today get everything warmed up and like Jeff said my name's Eric I'll be narrating the first bit of the show here so if you have questions let me know and we'll be taking questions from our online viewers as well so welcome to the folks at home welcome to you folks here at the museum and again Dan Friday working for the week here at the museum and this morning we made a glass bear now you can see an example of a piece that Dan made was this yesterday or Monday that he made this bear yeah Monday he made this bear right here and oh thanks the glass takes a long time to cool and it's cooled based on its thickness so that was made Monday and put into an oven and it cooled for about two days so just this morning we took it downstairs and kind of flattened it off a little bit so you're welcome to come up and check this piece out for this afternoon's session for the live stream oh there's a great camera angle right there for the this afternoon we're gonna be making a large-scale sculpture a totem so the base of the totem is going to be a large rock or Boulder that's going to be the base for a large bear who's going to be holding a fish and there's gonna be some tree components at the top so there's gonna be quite a lot of assembly that goes into this piece as we get moving you all right so we've got Amanda here a man is our social media manager do we have any questions for online yet not yet okay so we're just warming up what's the glass we're using we're using spectrum Nuggets 2.0 so it's really nice glass what what Dan is doing right now he's he's going into what we call a stuff cup so we've got a small pickup oven and inside the oven he's got some of these cups arranged inside and so this is a way to get the color on the very outside of these sculptural forms so basically he's gonna fill this cup with solid glass and then sculpt it so these have been preheated in that pickup box and it looks like George is just ramping the temperature up a little bit they can stay there indefinitely they're holding at about nine hundred and ten degrees but before the hot glass goes into them we'll bump it up to maybe 1100 so it doesn't get thermally shocked and broken so that's what's going on right now so looks like Taylor's got the glass heated up and Dan has it to the right size and volume and in just a moment they're gonna pick up that color cup inside the pickup box some beautiful colors here so all this prep work happens before the final assembly so just to make one of these cups you're maybe looking at maybe an hour of work just to get the cup finished and again you're welcome to come up check out some of the different parts and components we've got this second bear that is also out of the oven for Monday and this one's been cut level so you can kind of check it out any questions at this point okay again my name is Eric let me know if you have any questions our visiting artist is Dan Friday being assisted by Taylor Ames we've also got penny ray qov today and the rest of the see MOG team so welcome and joy make yourselves at home and enjoy the glass making so these are some pieces that Dan made just yesterday so these are just fresh out of the oven they're probably still warm Taylor cracked the annealer doors at like 180 today or something or did Jorge crack em but yeah either way okay fair enough I feel the same way yeah I feel the same way let them touch it first so the oven cooled down overnight probably 16 hours and they're still probably a little bit warm to the touch but you can see in the annealer over here he's got a couple of those other basket forms that he's working on as well so that's our melting furnace our melting furnace holds this one holds about a thousand pounds of liquid molten glass the temperature inside the furnace is 2100 degrees Fahrenheit and so at that temperature the glass glows that bright orange color it is clear it's just so hot that it produces its own light and again they're just getting the size exactly right so they can fill that cup without trapping in the air bubbles and without wasting any of the color that they've applied so once we get this glass inside of our stuff cup Dan actually brought some slides along with them so he's got a lot of visual information that will kind of run through and discuss his background and his family history and how that kind of inspires a lot of his work so that's a folded up newspaper pad that's one of our favorite tools to use because it's soft and flexible so just like those blocks of wood that are behind the bench that are soaked in water the newspapers soaked in water and it actually creates a layer of steam between the glass and the tool George has one over here this is a brand new newspaper you can see he's burning it in to get that nice carbon layer on the outside so into the reheating furnace we actually have the camera behind the reheating furnace that's one of our signature pieces of equipment here at the Museum so you can actually see what's happening inside that 2,000 degree furnace there's no glass on that second furnace it's just used for reheating as we go and it looks like we're gonna go into the stuff cup at this point so you want to direct your attention over to the right side of the stage your left every little movement makes a difference I could just see Dan just kind of using gravity there even in the furnace to get the glass to start to stretch so here we go you can see the cup sitting inside the oven he plunges it down it fills the cup and there we have our color right on the very outside it's a little brush there's some some kiln shelves in there so sometimes we pull out a little bit of dust on the the bottom there so he's just going to brush that off before he takes it in for a reheat we've got a question from one of our viewers why do the cold tools not cause the glass to break well it depends on at what point in the process you are at so if we're nearing the end of the piece and it's right around that 1202 maybe a thousand degree range a cold tool would absolutely break the glass but right now we're planning hot so the glass kind of winds that little competition so tailors using the the marver this is a slab of steel and it's one of our favorite tools I think it's always funny to think about a table as being a tool but it allows us to shape the glass and cool off different sections so there's steel acts like a heat sink it really draws the heat away from the glass so it sets different sections up and when we're making a blown vessel this is solid glass this is gonna be a solid glass sculpture but when we're making a blown vessel we control the wall thickness of that blown vessel by controlling the temperature of the glass before we inflate it so if we're on a blowpipe we'll oftentimes marver just the very end of the bubble and that preserves a little bit of thickness so again if you just joined us this is our visiting artist Dan Friday dan comes to us from Seattle Washington where he's a practicing glass artist and also works for the the boat house which is Dale Chihuly's studio right there in Seattle so he's had a long career in the Seattle area he has glass and a number of different collections and in galleries as well so he is actively selling the work that he makes so we're lucky to have him here it's always nice for us to have visiting artists come through because it's a learning experience for us as well we're watching techniques that we don't do here on a daily basis he's gonna cut that little bit of extra glass off and it's kind of hard to see the color at this point because the whole thing has that really bright orange glow but there is a light coating of the color just on the very outside of that piece so the reheating furnace it's also powered with natural gas there are four burners on this unit two on either side and they're angled at different angles so it creates kind of this vortex of fire inside of the reheating furnace and again right around 2100 degrees Fahrenheit so I think at this point Caylor could you turn on those slides we can run through some of the images that Dan brought yeah so here's a great example of one of the pieces that he's made previous to coming to the museum and these are about the same scale as the object that we have down here on the on the right hand side here's another example and Dan did you refer to these as lightning bears is that correct we'll get back to Dan just a second he's a little busy but here's another one of those basket forms that we've got right up here on the table another bear beautiful vessel there so we'll kind of touch back into those images in just a little bit okay so it's just getting the the sequence of events from Dan and you can see a lot of teamwork going on even at this very early stage he's cutting in a constriction line that we call the jack line or sometimes the neck line and that's where we actually remove that object from the pipe a little bit later so it sets up a weak spot in the glass and you could see Jeff there he was using a wooden paddle to flatten the bottom so that flat plane represents what will be the bottom of this entire totem structure that's gonna be sculpted that's an oxygen assisted natural gas torch so the flame right there is probably about 3000 degrees so it will allow him to get a really crisp edge really nice detail right on the bottom yeah so we have a question online which is more difficult to make blown vessels or solid work you know I think it's like apples and oranges they're both difficult just different each demands the same a level of attention and practice and precision so this base this is actually going to be put into our garage the garage is the kiln on the far right-hand side of the stage over behind George and we call it the garage because you can park things in there and forget about them for years at a time just like your garage at home but it's a place where we can store items at around 1,000 degrees so it's about the same temperature as this pickup box over here and then when we need them again we'll get them hot and reintroduce them into the 2,000 degree furnace so we'll have a couple of folks myself included just kind of watching those items as they hang out in the garage so this is a little bit like watching paint dry at this point we're just letting that glass cool down intentionally what else do you want to call it watching the grass grow but it's one of the few times that we intentionally let the glass cool down normally the name of the game is you know get it hot get it hotter but here we need it to actually solidify so that it is stable inside of the garage so George over there he's gonna start the punty the punty is a handle that will get attached to the base here and that way Dan can break it off of that first iron and attach it to a handle so that he can finish off the top half so this is a pretty traditional way of making most objects here in the hot shop we finished the bottom half first and then flip the piece around 180 degrees and then work on the top this is our pipe cooler it's a little water fountain and after we gather from that melting furnace the pipe itself gets pretty hot so we can cool that down make it safe and comfortable to handle that's beautiful dan that's right you never know until the next day it's a funny thing with glass making you know until it's cooled down and you can physically handle it it's hard to realize actually what's happened so George is making the punty there's a lot of different variety of pun tees this looks like what we call a ring ponte or a doughnut ponte so that's going to attach it's gonna give us a nice wide surface area so Taylor right now is just kind of taking these quick reheats we call these flashes and the quick reheat gives the inside of the glass a a chance to cool down well we just kind of give the outside just a little bit of that heat so it lets the inside temperature catch up with the outside it's a really important part of working when we have these really thick sculptural objects so here we got looks like George has it ready he'll bring it over to Dan Dan's going to attach it right to the center of that base and then get everything lined up we want those two pipes to be running in the same axis it looks like yeah I'll put a little constriction in that itself so anytime we make one of those constrictions it sets up a place where we can break that glass free so this this punty has to hold on till the very end but when the time comes to break the whole piece free we'll do it right on that constriction line so this is one of the times we actually break the glass intentionally so we use a little thermal shock so that's just some cold steel and a little vibration and here we go a few drops of water sets up thermal shock and it should just take a vibration to break it for you right on that line look at that pops right off let's give a nice round of applause first transfer of the piece so he's just making sure everything's on center oftentimes when you transfer the piece like that it has a tendency to fall to one side so it's kind of on that first reheat that you get a chance to Center things up and get them set so everything's running on axis for the rest of the piece so I just want to read a little bit about Dan Friday here he's got a little bit of information about his past I'm just gonna read this little clip here at the beginning Daniel Joseph Friday is a native of the Lummi Nation and a lifelong resident of Washington State's Puget Sound region drawing from cultural themes and using modern processes Friday's work is contemporary and format while maintaining basic Native American qualities dan has spent the last two decades working with artists such as Dale Chihuly Paul Mary Oney and Preston Singletary Friday lives in Seattle where he maintains an independent glass studio and his work can be found in collections around the world so with that let's run those slides again if we could Kayla Kayla is our AV technician upstairs in the booth and she's in charge of all the camera angles so here we go yeah so here's another example of Dan's work and this is a lightning bearer so he has different names for the different types of bears and maybe we'll get this little stick Mike would you mind just saying a couple words about the Bears Dan while we have just a minute testing testing one two hey I'm Dan and these are the Bears you can see this is an Aurora bear I started making the bears originally they've kind of changed a bit when I first started making them there were feet and quite a bit more detail but I felt like that took away from the beauty of the glass itself sort of so they're just figurative I really focus on the ears tail nose it's just a few little key elements that make a bear a bear bears in my family my great-great-grandfather hate to look seeum high schoo is we're kind of like a I wouldn't say clan because that's not the right word but the bear tribe bear family bear clan you'll see in the slides there's a howl air bear picture and there's some pictures of my great-grandparents that's a temper a bear lightning vase you can just kind of click through these two maybe canoe paddle so I'm from the Lummi Nation Seattle why I live in Seattle Washington my family history locally there comes from the Lummi Nation out which is just below the Canadian border in Bellingham are right outside in Bellingham Bay right outside of yet right at the very edge of the Puget Sound and you know we're a seafaring people canoes fisherman's we have our own sort of Coast Salish carving which is you may be familiar with more like Vancouver style totem poles and so on and so forth but the Coast Salish style is a little more has a little less detail and it's more of like a silhouette and has what's not traditionally called form line it has it definitely has a design of its own and my work is obviously very contemporary just being glass that there's a fern basket very similar to the salmon Gill basket that I made yesterday and as we're going and so it and I there's a totem right there my so my great-grandfather Joseph Hilaire was a really prominent Coast Salish totem pole carver and you can see in that totem right there that's what we'll be working on today is a totem very much like the one you see on the screen except this one is a massive Corning Museum of Glass style so there's another totem right there and so Mike my great-grandfather Joseph alario Hilaire was also a great orator and just a cultural conveyor for the Coast Salish people his total poles were in the World's Fair in 1962 they just a friend of mine Sean Peterson is actually working on restoring one of my one of Joe Hall eras poles in Kobe Japan and so it's growing up in a family of people that are artists like that it's it's always been its it's always been real inspiring but the idea of becoming an artist yourself let alone a glass artist is one of those things it's a lay of love in many ways this is there's a loom comb that's a it's all glass it may look like it's bone but it's a comb that they use for weaving another bear you can come on back George thanks Dan Dan's definitely multitasking here right now at the been shaping glass and managing the mic as well so yeah why don't we cut back to the live feed here and we'll pick up right with that slide but yeah we want to get some action shots of this sculpting going on right here this will be the base for a totem similar to the ones we just saw a few slides back so it'll give you an idea of the scale of these things and how he's gonna scale these up really working with the heat of the material you saw how long George was in the reheating furnace getting everything nice and soft nice and hot but it's already time to heat the glass up again so we only have time for a few gestures before it's right back into the reheating furnace it's always interesting to see when you know we have such a nice visiting artist program here at the Museum it's always interesting to see what tools artists travel with and you know I noticed Dan has quite a few very unique tools that we'll see him use throughout the process different pieces of pipe cut in half different pairs of pincers different sort of knives shapes or spatulas or all these different implements used to make all these details in the glass so pulling some material stretching the form out and just making sure there's no adhered glass sometimes when we cut through it it splashes dust onto the form so we just want to make sure that's nice and clean so there won't be any texture on the outside so Jeff is just going to get some rollers it's actually gonna turn this bass in the garage once Dan gets it all sculpted up here so he's gonna continue to use variety of sized paddles this tool here these are called the jacks and that's usually the most personal of the tools for a glassmaker it's kind of like the Swiss Army knife of glass tools we use a lot of different surfaces on it and they really do become an extension of the glass makers hand so yeah over here Dan's making the base over here on the second bench Taylor starting the gathers for the bear and he's just telling me between every gather he's going to take a flame polish in the reheating furnace and that's a way of ensuring that there's no residue built up between the layers that would create kind of a veil that you could see between each of the gathers so really nice tight quality control to get that perfectly clean surface yes we have an online question viewers wondering what the estimate will be for the pieces final wait and just chatted with Taylor for just a second we're gonna estimate it at about 30 pounds but you have to remember that's 30 pounds on the end of a six foot rod so it's like 30 pounds of dirt on the end of a shovel it feels a lot heavier when it's off the end of the shovel and then you have to factor in that the glass is moving so you have to factor in all that torque so this gathering process is is there's a lot that goes into it I think gathering is one of the most personal things that you do as a glassmaker everyone's kind of got their own technique but Taylor's responsibility really is to get a perfectly clean amount of glass with no bubbles or no imperfections trapped between those layers so he's gonna really take his time get started a little bit early so that process doesn't get rushed at all so Dan's got the oxygen assisted natural gas torch they're just doing what we call flame polishing away any chill marks from the tools so every time we touch the glass with a metal tool it cools it very quickly and it tends to leave a little bit of texture right on the surface so using that torch she's able to polish away any of those chill marks without heating up the core of that base so the piece doesn't start to move around very much but he's able to just superheat the very surface and it looks like he's gonna add some detail here he's got one of those specialty tools so he's gonna add a couple of these rings and I've noticed this pattern on a few of his pieces here so I was just asking day and that's how he marks his pieces that's his makers mark and the reason I wondered is because we've got the same mark on the bear over there if you take a look at the bear the same mark is there so we can see inside of our reheating furnace if you're seated over here you might be able to actually look through it we've got a small window in the back of the furnace and the windows made of glass and it's made of a glass called fused silica so that window has a much higher melting temperature it doesn't melt until I think about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit so the camera is an ordinary camera and it's just looking through that window so it's gonna give us some really amazing shots as this piece continues to develop so Dan was just saying this is one of the larger bases he's ever made and we were just discussing maybe the final height of the piece somewhere around 30 inches tall when we're all finished but George over here George has the base he's gonna get set up here to put this into the garage and we've got our rollers set up over here in the meantime Dan is gonna remove some small bubbles that we get from time to time in the furnace that's actually in the melt so again just another example of quality control removing any bubbles that Dan considers to be imperfections something that would make the piece of second quality piece so you really just have a limited amount of time to do that right when the glasses remove from the furnace to cut it cut away any imperfections or bubbles so the glass that we have over at the main bench again that's gonna go into another stuff cup that's heated up in the pickup box and this is gonna be for the bear so we're gonna start building this in pieces and then this morning Dan put some other parts into the garage he has the tree is in there and there's a fish in this oven as well so all of that work is gonna come out and be assembled hot there's no glue joints used in this process it's all hot so this is what we call the price check just eyeballing the size of the cup so that they can estimate how much more glass that they'll need to fill it so Taylor said he's gonna flame polish that gather one more time again just kind of burn away any residue from the block or the newspaper and make sure that surface is absolutely pristine before returning it into the furnace so that's going to prevent any veiling or any kind of layering within the the gathers I've just got a little heads-up from our social media manager Amanda she says that on our YouTube channel which if you're not a subscriber to now's the time we're just about to break 100,000 followers on our YouTube channel so go ahead and click the subscribe button and we've got a huge amount of content on that channel so when you get home and you've decided you would like to see some more glassmaking just follow the links from CM OG e org or just search the corning museum of glass on YouTube so there's that newspaper tool again it's the local paper the corning leader folded up soaked in water and that tool is soft and flexible so it's as close as the glass maker ever comes to shaping the glass just like you would shape clay on a potter's wheel and they're just getting it set up for yet another gather before the second stuff cup is picked up out of the pickup box so as we get set up for this next gather I wonder Kayla would you mind clicking this back onto our slides here for just a moment so here's another one of the Bears and there you see Dan's maker's mark I believe in color here's another version of a totem sculpture using that sort of rock formation as a base the really nice thing about these stuff cops is you do get that color on the very outside of the piece which gives you these really amazing optics there's another basket form well there's beautiful fish again you can see the maker's mark on the lower right the og bear that's one of the first bears so you can see how they've evolved over time you know this bear has the four legs and I heard Dan mentioned earlier that he moved away from that because it just sort of detracted he felt detracted from the natural beauty of the material so you can kind of see the evolution of the form and there's another example of his makers mark more sculptural work so here's a shot of Dan's family okay so this is Dan's on to just wrote a book working with Ohio State about your grandfather okay very cool and this is Dan's grandmother doing some of that traditional basket weaving and I think we'll just pause on the slide it's just a moment I just want to kind of get Dan's take on these he can probably give us a little more information about them so let's get back to that live shot thank you so much Kaylee wonderful job thank you and for those of you just joining us welcome to the amphitheater here at the Corning Museum of Glass we're really lucky today we've got our visiting artist Dan Friday right over here and Dan is with us for the week he's doing a residency here at the Corning Museum of Glass and today he's working on making large-scale totem sculpture so we've already got one component finished we've got the base done the basis of rock formation and Dan and his main assistant Taylor Eames are working on the second component which will be a large glass bear my name is Eric if you have any questions let me know I can see we've got the team over at the garage working on keeping that rock formation warm and stable but not so hot that it's actually moving around any questions in the audience right now okay oh great question we've got a question online how many components are going to make up the final piece so we've got the rock bass we've got the bear the bear is gonna be made in two parts so there's three we've got a fish there's four and then we have a tree I believe that might be two components so at least five maybe six different pieces when it's all said and done so there's gettin set up to take the final gather and again this this process right here really can't be rushed you know you don't want to catch any bubbles in between the layers or get any of that residue caught between the gathers so just making sure the quality is just right and Taylor's just cooling down the outside of the pipe before he heads into that 2,000 degree melting furnace we've got a great little gathering animation I wonder if we could roll that at this point just to give you an idea of what happens inside our furnace the glass actually sits inside of a ceramic crucible so Taylor's gonna take that gather push it below the surface of the glass turn the pipe in one direction and kind of wind on that material just like you would gather honey out of a honey jar and he'll come back out with about three times as much material so here we go into the molten glass you can see just winding it up and he'll come out with a pretty substantial amount that's a big cup that we have in the oven so there's our final gather for this stuff cup an important part of this is shaping it right as it comes out of the furnace so you notice Dan changing the angle of the pipe and every little movement really does alter the the shape of the form using gravity in both directions using the heat from the material and things like centrifugal force to get that to be the perfect shape you pretty much want to match the shape of the cup why cool the pipe before you go back into the furnace and then cool it when you come out of the furnace well because it's really hot so you want to keep the pipe cool it's more much as possible so Dan's gonna get that shaped up before he goes into the pickup box we've raised the temperature of the pickup box a little bit so it doesn't thermally shock the glass when we dip into it and how we doing over here Helen it looks like we've got this nice roller system figured out Wow so we've got these automatic rollers over here at the garage so these are going to keep the base turning it doesn't mean we can just walk away but it means we have a little bit more freedom babysitting the babysitter that's a perfect way of putting it yep so we've got our little mechanical control here keeping the pipe turning inside the garage so that's one of the first times we've been able to use that system but it really does help out especially when you've got something so heavy it prevents one person from having to keep that piece turning inside of the garage so I think at this point we're gonna go back into the pickup box and get that cup I see penny over there ready to open up the door whenever Dan comes over so you can see letting that glass kind of stretch trying to hit the bottom first and then fill from the bottom to the top and there we have our pickup Cup yeah he's working on a bear totem so the rock formation is the base this glass right here will be used to make the bear itself so the bear is gonna be kind of standing on the rock like this it'll be holding a fish and then there's also gonna be a tree at the top I believe yeah yep so we're gonna work on this piece this is probably gonna take the the better part of the next two hours to actually complete so it's a lot of building these parts and components and then at the end we'll put all of those parts together yeah we should probably be working for another two hours or so yep we've been working since this morning but since maybe about noon on this particular piece getting the parts ready to go so yeah this will be the bear and my understanding is the bear will be made in two parts there's going to be the body of the bear and then part of that stuff cup color will actually be removed so that Dan can sculpt the head in much greater detail being that it's not attached to the body itself and then we'll reattach things later on so yeah this piece will take three hours roughly Dan's been working with glass for about 22 years so it's really 22 years plus three hours to make a piece this complicated it's a long time we always tell folks that visit us at the museum here it takes about six years of full-time work to become a pretty good beginner and then you really start your your training dan has worked in the Seattle area for some time he owns his own studio he also works at the boathouse which is Dale Chihuly studio he's worked at the glass eye factory in the Seattle area as well so he has a really wide range of experience and tailor aims his assistant here today also works at the boathouse has also worked at the glass eye Factory so really a lot of combined experience here working on the floor today so the trick one of the tricks the hot sculpting is you really have to have a homogeneous temperature in the beginning when you're making really big drastic moves and then as it gets closer to the end you might take shorter reheats as to not distort the overall shape but to be able to make really detailed movements so you can just see how much time is spent just driving that heat back into the glass so George over here he's gonna make a pun T because I think as I mentioned earlier Dan wants to separate some of this glass so that you can use some of it to make the head separately so George is making what we call the punty that's just a little bit of clear glass on the end of a solid stainless steel rod and that'll kind of catch the the extra glass from the larger gather and then we can store that in the garage as well until needed so you can see the color change the the color closer to the the moil or the pipe you can start to see the true color a little bit better than the glass off towards the tip and that's because the the glass towards the pipe is cooler so you're starting to see that color come out whereas the glass closer to the tip is reading that bright orange because it is again closer to that 2,000 degree mark silver celadon oh I see the changes quite a bit okay so it's just over hearing Dan talk about the color that we're using he called it the second magic color and it's a silver celadon so all of our colors are made with different elements added to glass different elements from a periodic table and some of them really do change dramatically while we're working with them and dependent on the the density or the concentration and the amount of the color that we use so what he's after is kind of this blue to pink transition that he can achieve using this specific color so we'll look forward to kind of seeing that happen looks like Dan's ready to take off this extra bit of glass George is going to come over with his punty and they will attach it so another constriction line that's just gonna be another point where we remove glass so it's kind of like perforating the paper or the creases in a chocolate bar just sets up a weak spot that we can either cut through or use some thermal shock to remove the glass looks like they're just going to cut through this one so while Dan starts to sculpt the bear head tailor is gonna keep an eye on the the main gather here and that main gather will be for the Bears body I was just chatting with Taylor a little bit about his experience he started glass at a young age taking his first class at age 12 and then took a break came back to it at age 18 at the Seattle hot glass studio and he has well worked at the glass eye Factory and so has quite a load of a lot of a lot of experience for his his young age and it really shows your helping out Dan here today so we're onto the Bears head like I said the body is just in a holding pattern so we'll get some close-up shots of the the Bears head being sculpted and go from there so we're just gonna grab some calipers that way and get a measurement if the Bears head so once it goes into the garage Dan will be able to use that as a reference to get the proportions right for the body I always love watching glass sculptures we don't do a lot of it on a daily basis here at the Museum for the demonstrations so it's always a treat to have someone skilled like Dan come through and we can learn some tricks so we're here at the second bench we're just checking out this color this silver celadon and how quickly it changes under different temperature ranges and how that color it's kind of what we call a striking color whereas the glass cools off that color really strikes and you can see it but where it gets hot it actually kind of disappears so right here we're gonna see some really quick deaf movements to kind of get the proportions set up for the Bears head the details will come later but this just kind of divides up the glass and to the different anatomy and different anatomical sections of the head oh we have an online question is that a gas furnace and if so what type of glass gas yeah it is it's natural gas and most of the equipment down here in the amphitheater stage is run on natural gas the melting furnace the reheating furnaces and then we have some electric ovens the garage is also natural gas run which is fairly common but upstairs we actually have an all-electric glassblowing studio which is really unusual and it was developed in partnership with Fred Matz out in Seattle and that's in our innovation stage but I'd say yeah it's fairly common to have the studio run on natural gas sometimes propane is used as well all right we're gonna give Erik's knee a break everybody out there on the live feed give him a hand yeah that's right everybody all right my name is Jorge and I'd love to answer any questions that you have also so right now Dan is actually working on the Bears head and Eric's gonna give him some reheat so we're getting all set up he's really thought about this and he's really planned it out he's made many of these pieces before but not with this team so Dan's actually doing a week-long residency here at the Corning Museum of Glass here in the amphitheater and he talked us through how he wants to put this together so we have a couple of pieces going at the same time jeff macke is at the other bench keeping the main body warm so he's flashing it in our small reheating furnace while Dan works on this head you could really start to see the detail coming out years and a muzzle do we have a question Bob spider-girl is watching alright hey Bob we're looking forward to Bob he's gonna come and work with us this summer yeah dance told us a bunch of stories about Bob they used to work together back in the day at the glass eye so yeah yes how long is Dan and everybody on the team been blowing glass for well Dan has been making glass for 22 years and that's not like working on the weekends he's been a full-time glass maker for 22 years he's worked I would say probably the majority seven days a week so he works full-time for a glass artist named Dale Chihuly and he's worked for him for about 18 years and he also has his own shop his own studio and has been making his own work for he said pretty consistently for the last five years so he said he started selling about the last five years yeah he's probably been messing around making his own work for a long time but but really getting serious and selling his work together is probably in the last five so now Eric's knee he's been making glass for about 20 years Chris Rochelle on the other bench he's been making glass for about 20 Helen also I think I'm the old guy on the team I've been making lasts about 28 is glassblowing and easy hobby to pick up of course it is everybody should try it it's very easy you'll be sculpting on your second day blobs of uneven beautiful glass if it survives well is it always a team well it's not always a team I like to say there's a lot of people that have a small Studios that they'll make you know things like holiday ornaments paper weights maybe some drinking glasses when you get into more complicated things like sculpting glass like a totem pole you're gonna need a pretty big team now Dan probably doesn't have the luxury of having a large team like this at home but I bet you he's probably got two assistants that help him make work like this Dan normally how many people would be assisting on three people he spends the extra extra money and he has three assistants probably including himself what does Dan's favorite piece that he's made he really likes making making the totems yes I think this is gonna be his best one no pressure Dan we really we've really enjoyed having Dan here this week it's been a lot of fun having a new guest artist come in and watch them watching the way that they work yeah it's a real treat for us you're over here laughing Amanda what's going on oh you don't have you have a question you don't want to answer I think we could answer that we have a we have a question how much would it cost for a studio artist to use the studio for a day it's 5,000 bucks a day you get the full hot shop to get the full C MOG team it's only five grand today that's a bargain Dan how much do you think it would cost to rent a Hooley studio for a day he's under contract he's not allowed answer that I'm sure there's a premium to be paid [Laughter] so they have corporate events at Julie's studio so if you have a corporate event you can has anything ever gone horribly wrong never nothing ever goes wrong when things usually go horribly wrong we turn the reheating furnace off and we go home all right we're gonna take a 5-minute break from the mic I'm gonna get a drink of water I'm gonna check on the reheating we have two questions all right I'll answer two more questions before we take a little hiatus did Dan start doing this as a hobby yeah so Dan started in the factory he's been getting paid from day one yeah dan said he spent a lot of free time working for other artists to learn what he's capable of doing now I would say most artists that are you know very good actually do this whether they got paid or not what's the second question oh that's a pretty good question we're gonna let Dan think about that we'll be back before I forget I want to give a shout out to Taylor's mother I hear she's watching Taylor says I love you mom he's being a good kid out here in Corning going to bed early getting up early you all right we have a we have a heckler via Internet Jim Mann grain from Team Chihuly he's uh he's creeping on you dan dan wants to know where you get the meatball pizza Jim is it any Leo's or is it Atlas yeah those are our two famous pizza joints here on Market Street Atlas and Annie Leo's it aney Leo's they wear a shirt that says on the back have you had a hot piece lately I think we should get a shirt like that Annie Leo's yeah we knew it hey Jim get to work that's from Dan [Laughter] [Music] dan that bearer head looks so small inside that reheating furnace [Laughter] all right so Dan said he's almost finished with the Bears head and then he's gonna move on to the next step so there it is very nice we're gonna put this on hold also I don't know if we're gonna stick this in the garage we have a piece of equipment over on the right-hand side of the stage called the garage where we can actually put pieces of glass and keep them warm so we have the base of this totem pole already made and it's just sitting in the garage it's gonna be the bottom so we wanted to make that first he's gonna make all these other parts and we're gonna put them together all at the end can we actually show some of Dan's slides where's the clicker here it is all right so here's here's some slides and maybe we can show a couple of the totems hey here's a good picture of Dan and his sister ray all right we all know ray ray used to actually work here at the Museum and right now she's back in Seattle working at a place called glassy baby boy Dan that picture was from awhile ago how old were you guys then it's in Europe let's see if we can find one of these totems this is one of the Bears that Danny actually has made a couple of those there's one over here on the table down here Dan made this bear on Monday so that's the scale of the bear there's a bowl that he has made before you can see some of the these are actually baskets so these are baskets that he made yesterday so with this basket series all of these lines are individual canes they start out looking like this and then they're chopped up into specific specific lengths set out a pass to really plate like this they're all lined out he makes to the pattern and then we heat him up he pushes them together and then he rolls them up on a collar and blows them into these shapes now there is a totem right there this is similar to what Dan's making right now so he's got the base made he's got the Bears head he's got the fish in the treetops in the owl in the garage so he actually started making these parts on Monday he knew he wanted to do something like this for the live stream I would say if Dan was gonna make these from start to finish it would probably take him a whole day probably 10 or 12 hours I bet and so he's made some parts like I said they're over here in this garage just keeping warm we haven't met about a thousand degrees when he gets ready to use them we'll pick him up and we'll heat him up in the flame take him to our reheating furnace get him warm enough where we can assemble them yeah I bet you it's going to be about three feet tall there's another one I like that one that's cool I'll go back if you look on the bear in the back you can see that red dot that's actually amorini and that's how Dan signs his pieces with a specific type Marine he actually has some over here on the table this is what they look like so he made a bear today yeah he heated this up we stuck it on the back of the bear yep he's from Seattle Washington yep that's where he grew up all right we can go back to the live feed alright Jeff's putting that piece in the oven you could see that little hole opening there in the middle of the garage he's gonna stick it in there keep it warm we'll put a little brick in there now once he's in there for a minute or two it's gonna cool down enough where it stops moving so that garage on the hot side it's probably about 1,300 degrees on the cold side it set it at a thousand and 25 so at a thousand 25 the glass is still warm but it's not moving so we can set it in there know what's going to stay hot and make some other parts so Helen Taylor she's cooled the pipe she's gonna bring this glass over and Dan's going to make I think the Bears body out of this so Taylor's gonna take over him and Jim work together to sculpt the body of the bear and we'll continue on so now Dan's working on the the body of the bear you can see he's using this folded up newspaper really using his fingers to squeeze that shape out flattening one side of it that paper works really well for shaping hot glass this is a metal spatula we call this a tag real simple tools but really versatile pair of tweezers this would be a very stylized bear I believe you can see is the glass cools down it turns cold makes it very slippery very hard to grab with the tweezers Dan's got a mark now he'll reach in there and pull it right out sometimes it really helps to stand outside the bench Dan's got a another pair of tweezers he's gonna use to maybe mark it oh yeah yeah yep those are nice now when they're working getting ready to sculpt you can see Taylor will stop and let it fall off center then he flips it and Dan can mark it right in the center these are special tweezers they kind of have they almost look like little bleeds it gives them a very sharp line dan what color did you use for this stuffed cup metallic celadon it's pretty pretty cool because as it heats up it really turns clear and you can't yeah it's like a silver glass silver blue silver opaque you can see the transparency of it yeah now as they're working on this they're still trying to keep this relatively centered you know so you can see as it falls off center they flip it over work on the front half once that starts to fall off center they flip it over and work on the backside you can see that color starting to come through at the top next to the boil now once he gets this shaped up things will start to come together pretty quickly we'll start putting these pieces together all right so we're gonna get this start to warm up all these parts that are in the garage we've been a lot of babysitting going on over here in the garage we've got the rock bass we've got all the other components and so while Dan Friday finishes up that little bear booty we're gonna go ahead and work on getting everything else ready to start assembling now one of the trickiest things about assembling big sculptures like this and projects that have so many different parts is the heat maintenance needed to put everything together it's really easy to have one of these parts get a little too cold and maybe end up having a crack form once those kind of things start to happen there's not much we can do to fix that so it's been a lot of heat maintenance over here in the garage this garage is designed to hold lots of things just like your garage at home and you can somewhat forget about it over here especially when you've got a fancy apparatus like the turning mechanism we set up it's been keeping everything turning and nice on center so so many little movements just to get those little gestures in all of the parts of the bear it's one of my favorite parts to look at a tool bench of a gaffer that who does a lot of sculpture because there's always so many very specific tools that are set up although Dan you got a pretty organized bench for a sculptor for now but I've got lots of little toys to choose from different size paddles to get in nice and tight in those little details bigger paddles for broad strokes and then lots of other texturing tools a lot of glass workers will go beyond just the tools that are available for sale they're all handmade as well so they're all very unique and special objects in their own right but even just a quick trip to the hardware store or the kitchen store or goodwill you can find some really interesting tools and I've noticed a lot of other sculptors everyone has at least a butter knife or some sort of knife they've chopped down sharpened up and made for very specific applications in sculpture in addition to this hot torch though it's got to be one of the most influential ships in glass here for the sculpture world being able to really spot heat specific areas with intense heat really opens a lot of possibilities I'm just using that fluffy torch that we have that that heats things up but not nearly as specific as that torch now earlier as Dan was making all of the other parts and the head of this bear he took a couple measurements and that's really important because when you're working on component sculpture like this you want everything when you assemble it finally to actually be proportionately correct and sometimes that can be a little tricky making that head with imagining how big the body would be or vice versa and as you said earlier a small head on a bear doesn't quite look right a big head of bear might look a little all right you can get away with it but it's not not really how it should be thank you I think big headed things make them look more childlike but little heads just this doesn't yeah it just doesn't the proportions don't work out so we're already starting to pull out that rock this is gonna be the base of our totem here and that's what's been babysat over in our garage for a while does that have a color on it what color are we got on the base oh it's the same as that so the whole thing is made out of the same so starting to get that rock all warm back up cooling down the pipe when you're hanging out in the garage like that there's a lot of intense heat coming out of there so the garage right now is around 10:20 for 10:30 so that's a pretty good amount of heat and it's a temperature where the hopefully the glass won't change when it's in there so whatever we put in we can get out looking exactly the same as we put it in there but when it's attached to a pipe you need to set it in there and the pipe starts to get hot as well now organ amelie if we can hold the glass as close to the glass as possible it's not gonna feel nearly as heavy and I guarantee when we start stacking all these things together they're gonna feel very heavy and so cooling that pipe allows you to just move up on that pipe hold things a little closer and save everyone's backs but we do have a lot of people here today to help out so we can spread around the heavy lifting dan says he normally works only with about three people making these objects today we've got almost seven people working on this so it's a nice change of pace we get spoiled rotten here at the Corning Museum of Glass all right so it looks like we're up to 308 viewers online we've got a lot of people watching online which is great because we got a small but mighty crowd here in the house today whoo that's nice to have the global community joining us here for the Corning Museum of Glass live feed with Dan Friday such a privilege to have artists come and work with us here at the Museum we've had this ongoing a visiting artist program developed over the last few years and having this brand new space here really has amped up our involvement with bringing artists in got a wonderful space here to be able to give them opportunities to try new things expand their horizons in glass and get that extra little help when needed we also bring in a lot of non glass artists especially from the Rockwell any artists who are coming through the Rockwell we also bring those folks in to work with our team for a couple days so it's a really fun to have such a talented and well-known artist like Dan Friday join us here teaching us new things having a lot of fun so against our sibling some of these little parts here so we moved over to the small bench for now it's nice to that we have two spaces to work here this side vents really close to the garage it can help us really assemble things fairly quickly right up with the objects in that garage I saw this prep work that's been happening over the last day and this morning or in this afternoon we've got it all ready to start putting all the parts together this is gonna be a totem so a nice tall collection of items put together into this totem form and besides the rock being our base our bear will be holding up the rest of our objects so just taking a little time to mark the pipe make sure that everything is lined up sometimes in the heat of the moment you get a little quick movement you got to move fast to make sure everything's stuck together and it's really easy to lose track of what's up and down when you're assembling a lot of different parts so anything you can do to help yourself out points of reference always helpful this is also the part where we're going to start putting these things together all on one pipe so start to really build up the weight of this piece as we assemble it that's one of the reasons why you make all the parts ahead of time so you don't spend a lot of time just flashing that big heavy object while you're making all the different parts well-placed nice and hot with that torch you don't want all the parts moving we just want the connections to be nice and warm if those are at all cold when you put them together they won't truly bond only hot things will bond together and so you want to make sure that they are one piece of glass now the very top of this bear does have a constriction line at the at the near the pipe because this is where we're gonna break it off and so putting it in weakness a nice tight constriction line will help in that separation but we wouldn't want it to separate at the feet at any one point of this collection it's going for the tap method today just chipping away just a little bit and a little water to thermally shock the top of our bear body to break it free there we go beautiful job first part together I know there's thunderous applause in the audience there online it's only a few folks here but welcome everyone is coming into the theater we got a lot of people showing up here in the amphitheater you've joined us on a very special day and a very special time of day we're here with Dan Friday and we're doing a live feed on the Internet to acrost wherever you've got access you can connect with our website and watch some of the action that happens here at the Corning Museum of Glass and today we have Dan Friday working on a totem we've made all the parts that are needing to go into making this totem earlier today and yesterday and so now it's getting to a little bit more of the exciting part can start to assemble things together and combine this all together and to be a very tall solid sculpture what color is the bear now the bear is a really fun unusual color and he still hasn't told me the number of it to fear for those glass geeks out there but it's a high silver color that's more of a chameleon color so when you're looking at it in some light it will look kind of amber some light to look a little bit more milky and go kind of a greenish color so it has a lot of really interesting qualities but the metals gonna come to the surface and where it's thick it's where it's thin when you're looking through it when you're looking at the outside or the inside every view will be different so it's hard to really classify it as a specific color more than just a little bit of a rainbow chameleon on the surface now all of the parts that we're making here today as well they've all been made by using stuff cups and so you blow out a bubble and you open that bubble up to be a cup and then you stuff it full of clear glass and then make the sculpture out of that so the color that you see is not on the surface it's actually sandwich just under the surface of the clear and so it looks like it is solid color but we're really just looking at a thin layer of color on that piece all right for all you glass geeks out there it's k-19 for the base rock that we're working with he said it looks amber but when you stretch it real thin it goes a little bit pink here we got our little head so just torture those two items together making sure when they stick it together hopefully it will be facing the right way as well but just doing a bit of a size comparison there so if anyone out there has any questions especially here in our audience definitely feel free to ask a let us know but we're working here again with Dan Friday he's from Seattle born and raised in that area and he's been working in the glass field for over 20 years so a lot of really wonderful experience works in Chihuly's studios and various other studios in the area owns his own shop as well so does a lot of work at home and has been producing amazing work for many many years but really concentrating on some of the specific work for the last maybe five years he said so if you want to check him out online we got Friday glass comm and I'm sure he's connected with all the social medias so you can follow him and find out the final look of this piece we will be posting an image of this on our website I imagine when it is complete and you can keep track of us here at the Corning Museum of Glass online so we got a we got a question on line here it says how hot can it get in the studio you know we don't have any thermometers around here but I know that in general this studio can stay a little colder than most because we have air conditioning so if you see on the floor here in the front of the stage on occasion the cameras pan around you might be able to see some yellow boxes on the floor and those are actually air conditioning vents so once again very spoiled here in the gardening Museum of Glass Studio so we can put in a little bit of cooler air into the room if necessary not is a very big room we do have a lot of furnaces here burning so it can get very very hot especially George has probably got one of the hottest jobs right now standing right in front of that reheating chamber that's over 2,000 degrees so it's radiating a lot of heat coming out of there and off of that piece so it's really important for glass workers to of course stay hydrated kind of taking breaks whenever possible trading around some of that lifting and heavy responsibility to try to take care of each other and take care of the peace but in general it's never really squall Turing in here compared to an outdoor shop or a lot of other shops I've worked in now one of the other things that can help us keep it a little cooler in here you might notice whenever we're heating in that reheating furnace they'd have hinged doors we can open and close those doors to accommodate larger and smaller work so not only for energy conservation trying to keep those doors closed as much as possible to conserve as much heat inside of that furnace as possible it also can help contain that heat within there it's also all the hot shop equipment here is located underneath a hood so there's suction really sucking a lot of that hot air out of the building and putting it right out so if you step outside you can feel some of the heat from our furnaces out there as well but we do it everything we can this this studio is very specifically designed to be a hot shop and so there was a lot of thought put into the airflow and the exhaust systems and how everything comes together to make it a comfortable and amazing place to work how tall will the totem be when it's finished hmm this might be the biggest one yeah is it as it might be the biggest one yet he's made a lot of these in preparation for the one he's making here and usually that does turn into the case when people come to the corning museum they make the biggest one they've ever made because they've got George to pick it up for one thing and we also have that very large furnace there too so we're bringing out the big guns today not only the physical labor but also the furnaces were working out of this particular one I could probably sit indian-style inside cross-legged and be able to stand up it's a pretty big big space it even has sliding doors instead of that last opening of the hinge doors it has sliding doors that open up even further without blasting all the heat from those doors onto you so right now we've only got the bear but we also in the Box have at least a tree that has a trunk on the tree we've got a fish and I think there's one other part is that a little bird for the top is that what's the little owl on the top nice so we still have a lot of components now this bear is going to be the biggest feature of this totem so it's definitely the most height involved in the rock and the totem but the trees probably another six or seven inches on there and then the fish and of course our little owl is probably about four or five inches but we are kind of limited by not just the size of the pipes we need to be able to pick up and manipulate this work but if you were to build it too tall and it wouldn't go back into that furnace to reheat the whole time that could cause problems because if you max out the size of that reheating furnace then there's no way to keep the peace equally warm now we're always getting whatever's farthest away from us it's easiest to keep the hottest so we're building from the pipe down or the pipe up depending on how you want to think about it but we're trying to build it one piece at a time so that we can work right now on the very top of the body but if it starts to stack up together and gets too far and touches the back wall then maybe that moil area by the pipe would get too cold and start to crack we got another question online how long can you keep glass warm in the garage well I guess with proper maintenance as in watching and babysitting and making sure that it's maintaining the temperature of the furnace itself or the garage of itself you're rotating it on occasion to make sure it's not creating any kind of flat spots and you're keeping it in that sweet temperature you can pretty much leave it in there indefinitely because the glass is being held at a temperature where hopefully it won't crack hopefully it won't move so if you can find that sweet spot it can stay in there pretty much indefinitely now you don't really want to leave it in there unmonitored because if it does start to get a little too warm it could start to shift and pick up dirt from the base of the garage and things like that so typically we would load the work that we're going to make that day in that garage warming it up slowly and then trying to use it all that same day yeah most of the time for glass as well since glass expands when it heats and it shrinks when it cools you need to have it go through a proper cooling cycle to get it to survive so even if we had extra objects in that garage at the end of the day we wouldn't want to leave them in there and just shut the garage off we would actually pull them out put them into the annealing oven allowing it to cool down really slowly to make sure it would survive that entire cooling process but this entire piece will be put away at the end into one of our kneeling ovens allowed to cool really slowly since it's solid it's probably gonna be in there for a few days at least I know it's really big but it's not the the size of the piece we're looking at its the thickness of the piece that we're looking at so if this were hollow and just as big we could cool it maybe a little bit faster than where it is that solid mass now with all the parts and the pieces and all the strange connections that can also cause some unusual cooling rates and so you'd want to go nice and slow just to make sure that all those little parts were cooling even as well all right you can already start to see in the legs of that bear some of that kind of schmaltz enos coming to the surface these colors are really amazing nice little belly rolls do you focus out and our stands have any questions here today Dustin's been working he's doing a lot of little little touches with the metal paddle and I think this is one of the hardest things when you're working with glass and you're trying to carve something out of a solid mass is to really try to think about what all those little parts you need to kind of push the glass to have an area to move forward and being able to compress it and even the smallest touch will leave a mark on the glass and it's very difficult to remove so it's very economy of touch to make sure you get that actually let me come up because I can't quite hear you I can come to you it's just a little too loud down here with the thing we got a question from our audience here alright so there's our question he said I mentioned there's lots of components and the question is is he gonna finish it today yes in theory he is going to finish it I'm not sure if we'll come in right at the four o'clock mark we might go a little over it really kind of depends but if we do somehow go over and we're not able to livestream the complete finished product we will definitely have an image of it on our website within the next couple days well it's gonna take a couple days to cool down but yes once you start a piece like this now he could make those components and anneal them all and bring them all back up but we've got them all hot we've got them all made so so that right now yeah they're all in the garage they're all awaiting their moment of truth to pop out and get onto this piece of glass and come together as the beautiful sculpture so yes if all goes well it'll all be completed before we walk away here today all right so we got another question from online just curious about glass and what it's made out of what kind of glass we're working with now our glass is a spectrum product glass for those glass people out there but for those of you don't know what that means that's just a manufacturer of glass for our glass we're part of a family of soda lime glasses and those are probably the most common types of glass you're going to come in contact with it's gonna be your soda bottles it's gonna be your pickle jars your windows it really is a big category and so each formula for glass when tweaked a different direction will give you different working properties so for our glass being soda lime it's got silica as the main former and then we have soda ash and limestone added to it that's where we get the soda lime title so the soda ash is a flux that lowers the melting temperature from about 4,000 to closer around 2,000 and then we've got the limestone which is a stabilizer and so if you look at really ancient glass they might not have had the right kind of balance of stabilizers and the water has started to actually penetrate into that glass and eat it away and so by adding that limestone it creates a more stable glass now ours is meant to play with it it's designed specifically for the glassblowing community and the fusing community so it is a really soft glass it's very malleable it stays warm for long periods of time as opposed to perhaps something that would be used in a bottle factory where you want it to set up really quickly and produce thousands of them a minute and so you could use that kind of glass to blow glass you just have to work really fast and you might not be able to get the same kind of effects but there's lots of different kinds of glasses out there but the glassblowing community really has a handful of them the few manufacturers that have come up with formulas that we've all decided are fairly stable and so we can order our glass from those manufacturers now if we want to make colored glass then we would just add different metal compounds and oxides into those raw materials in their powdered form to be able to create various colors now we have one small color tank here at the Museum that we will on occasion melt a little bit of color here and there but typically we only purchase our color separately once again the manufacturers have it all figured out they can work with the large furnaces required all the raw materials in a safe manner something that we're not necessarily all set up to produce and so we just buy our colors separately and then can add them in now all of the color that Dan has used today he's using our clear glass as the base but he's used chunks of solid color to create all of the colors that you see on the object and so took a solid chunk of color started with that gathered clear glass over top of it blowing out a bubble opening that bubble to be a little cup and then stuffing that cup with a lot of clear glass and having that whole package back on to a solid pipe to be able to sculpt it into the different components so the colors that you're looking at one they're gonna look a little different because they're hot as opposed to when it is right back to room temperature but it's also just a really thin layer right underneath the surface of all of these objects so really good questions on line here today keep them coming if you're interested in something we'll do our best to answer it for you here today especially those you and live in house we really appreciate you coming to the Corning Museum of Glass I hope you've enjoyed your day so far but lots of things to see and do here at the Museum but this is a really special thing we don't often have visiting artists with us and we've been very privileged to have Dan Friday with us all week he still it's only got a couple more days left with us he's here through Friday so if you are in the local area and would like to come and hang out with us definitely come and watch Dan work he's will be here until 4 o'clock on Friday so we want to make sure and get anyone who's interested oh that's a really good question so can you rework a soda bottle or a window into something else now in general I will say that glass is infinitely remelt able so yes I could take a soda bottle and I could pick it back up and I could get it hot and I could cut it or I could dent it or I could put a texture on it and I could make it into something else if I wanted to add more things to it however I would need to make sure and have the same kind of glass because all glasses will melt but not all of them will cool properly together because each one with a different formula is also has a different coefficient of expansion which means the rate in which it expands and contracts or the amount that it grows in it shrinks as it heats and it cools and so I could take a soda bottle and I could wow MIT or a pickle jar and then I could try to stick a handle made out of a soda bottle on it but as they went to cool they would most likely shrink at different rates and pop apart and break and so if I wanted to make a sculpture out of soda bottles I would need to make sure I get all the same soda bottles and I would need to melt melt all that glass together and hope that the manufacturers are close enough that we can end up having something survive that cooling process but yes it takes a lot less energy to melt remelt glass and it does to melt from its raw materials and so it's to our advantage to be able to recycle glass as much as possible now it is possible if you take a particular kind of glass and you melt it for too long for too hot it can actually start to change the chemistry of that glass you start to kind of cook out the things that make it the kind of glass that it is so even our glass will recycle as much clear glass as possible putting it back into our furnace but if we're not careful about finding the balance of the amount of recycle and the amount of fresh new glass we can start to see chords form in the glass now chords are just kind of thicker bands of glass kind of look like snot bubbles in there it's really unattractive it's really difficult to blow out nice even forms with Cordy glass because it is moving slightly differently the chemistry has changed and it's a little bit adjusted but here we've got another size comparison you can see took the top of that bear and what looked like the top of the bear and split it down the middle and so that was our going to form the arms on our bear and so now we just need to get the arms pulled back into the right position and then that head can fit right into nestling on those shoulders there's a really fun way of working with the solid glass he could have also added bits to this object so the arms could have just been added additions but building from the core getting everything from one solid mass this is going to be a better way of keeping all the color consistent because those little bits if they were to add separate bits we would have had to make another stuff cup for each arm and kind of work through on getting all that color and so cutting up up the same blob of glass in multiple ways is a great way to create all that consistency in the object it always kind of looks funny I really love as you're building sculpture all these moments of strange shapes coming off of everything so it kind of looks a little like ears hanging off the top of this body but this will be nice little arms when he's finished so just doing a little refinement I think on the head of the bear so we're getting ready to assemble this head here so we got Taylor he's also from Seattle he's joined us here with Dan Friday he's a regular assistant in Seattle so he's the resident expert on how to work with Dan and how to make all this happen so he's going to get in and do some of this final detailing prepping of the temperatures and everything together also on the team we got George Kennard here he's being our hired gun for lifting here this afternoon carrying this piece back and forth Erik's knee helping out as well we got Jeff Macke penny ray cops also joined us as a somewhat collaboration they've been working together on some Marini patterns for some bears this week as well my name is helen Tegeler i'm doing some narrating right now played babysitter early on but this is a really fun thing about having such a good team such a big team we can all rotate through kind of jump in wherever necessary to help each other out and make sure that this is a successful piece all right there we go great shot there of the action now once this has been attached you can break free that punty but right now it's just using this as good leverage making sure it's got just the right heat just the right connection and the right positioning there we go nicely done now our bear has a head even the Bears happy he's like yay arms up in the air all excited you can see it's still a little soft there's just a little bit of movement now the key was that they made a lot of heat only in that connection so he can push and pull and prod at that head or the body without disturbing the form but has that nice hot connection to help move around to get the right gesture not only is proportion really important when you're working with sculpture but it's also the gesture that really tells the story and really illustrates what you're trying to communicate with the animal or the object all right now that we got all the parts for this bear we need to clean up that punny mark anytime you break something free where it was connected it always leaves just a little bit of a scar mark whether it's from that transfer punty a little bit of excess left on there sometimes you purposely leave a little bit on the end for stability and then you'll actually cut that off later you really want to be careful when you separate it not to get it to take a divot out of your object so it's better to leave a little extra and then go back in and kind of push it into place or remove any excess from that transfer or that punty so a little bit of cleanup a little bit of maintenance you can see they're doing a lot of torching on the back end of our piece as well right by the pipe that big moiled an excess glass that's right on the pipe we need that to hold on to our piece keep everything on to the iron and since it's the furthest thing away from the heat most of the time it has a tendency to get really cold and so if that were to get too cold it could crack and pop off and the whole thing would fall so that's really our foundation our stability is right there on that pipe so maintaining a lot of good heat getting the torches on to it keeping it a little bit of color it's really gonna give us the best insurance policy to be able to continue shaping that piece you know also start to see is it slightly cools we've got quite a color difference between the bear and the base itself so this will still be a very different looking object when it's finished the colors will come through in a very different form when they are fully room temperature and cold but we can already start to see those colors developing a little bit when there we got the colder it looks like we're going in for our fish fishy so you can see nice hot bit of glass so this is just the punty transfer he's picking it up with fresh hot glass and this garage is designed to have two sides basically so this garage is designed very specifically to have two temperature zones at least so you've got the flame on one end and then you've got no flame on the other side so one side of that garage tends to get hotter than the other so when you're doing things in somewhat long-term storage you'll keep them over on the right side of that garage keep them stable they won't get too hot they won't change or anything and then you move them over to the left side closer to that flame when you're getting close to the time that you want to start picking them back up since they are at a temperature around a thousand degrees give or take depending on which side you're in that's a temperature where the glass isn't going to change but if it's too cold and we pulled something straight out of the relative cold side and went straight into one of our reheating furnaces it'd be too much temperature change too quickly and they would crack and so instead you move it over to the left side you hold it near or above that flame for a few minutes to really get it as warm as you can in that environment before you go for your final flash of heat now if they wanted to attach this and get it moving once you get it back onto a pipe once you get it back into that reheating furnace you could get it as hot as you wanted to get it moving around or whatever you need to continue to manipulate that object but he's pretty much finished all of these components there they are as they are and they are pretty much finished so it'll just be a matter of assembling these things together rather than continuing to work on those forms so Taylor's back over here on babysitting duty warming up our little fishie while Dan starts working on the arms of our bear this was all separated away from that solid mass on the pipe and so he's just starting to partition out what will be his pause but will be his arms and his shoulders this again one of the tricky things of working with sculpture is kind of guessing how much of that mass you need to pull out to be able to leave enough arms on there if he didn't have enough mass separated out then it could have little teeny arms and there's not much you could do to add glass now you can always take glass away so if the arms were too big or too long he could trim away some of that excess but it looks like you did a great job on pulling the proportions that he'll need for this particular bear yeah I like the gestures of this very playful totem that he's putting together all right so our fish has gotten warmed up in that hot side of the garage long enough so it's gonna make its debut come on out and go for a good heat in our reheating chamber you got enough room so it's always a nice it's a delicate balance when you're working with this garage parts not only keeping things in the right temperature but also picking them up making sure they're in the right position cleaning off a little dirt on occasion trying not to do anything to shock the glass it's actually I think one of the more stressful jobs on the team is being the garage monitor and pulling things out of the out of that garage there's really a lot of skill involved in this whole entire process we've got a lot of experience here on the team and that really does help good assistants are also good gaffers and vice versa and so it's really great to be amongst so many talented folks here today and seeing this come together so smoothly everybody seems real chill and relaxed and taking it one step at a time just did a quick little peek in that reheating furnace it's got a really fun unique view of the inside there there's a camera located behind a very specialized piece of glass according to run the only place that has that special view but it just kind of curious how much more real estate we had in there to build our Bear totem on and there's tons of room in there so you can keep stacking things taller and taller yep all right so we're starting to really put these final touches here on this assemblage we got our fish attached now once again has just a little bit of a mark left from that pun D so he'll work on the gesture making sure it's really well contacted down and then clean up any items that need to now the tweezers themselves were those were warmed as well anything can shock the glass and so you have to be really careful about even what you touch the glass with as you're working so all these metal tools they don't stick to the glass because they're slightly colder but they can shock the glass if they're too cold so a lot of times you'll warm those up just a little bit and penny was definitely doing the warm-up on those before we did the attachment it's like this he's really pushing down that fish all along the Bears hand so you really feel the weight of that fish the curving down and around it's also important to keep things centered by the time you finish you want to make sure the balance is correct if you lean to more too far one way or the other then of course it's gonna be very difficult to stand this up proud so paying really close attention to as they stack all these items how the balance is gonna work out on this piece as well already starting to talk a little bit more about the heat maintenance we've got a pretty solid mass of glass here and that that stays fairly warm when you go to reheat but those little tips there's different parts that'll start to cool down like the tip of his nose the tip of his little tail the edges of the fish his little head and and tail and of course that punty making sure there's still enough heat there's a lot of little adjustments nee being done alright next comes the tree trunk got a tree that's made in two parts that way it can be the right color and the right shape so that's once again been flashed many times you can see where the heat is in those two items making sure that they bond together nice and strong really wigging it wiggling it around making sure all those tree roots really get seeded well on to that fish all right nicely done they make it look so easy folks make it look so easy so one of my favorite parts is well working here at the Corning Museum being able to see that inside view especially when we're working with animals and objects they really get a lot of character when you see them from the other side dancing around in that furnace furnace is around 2100 degrees Fahrenheit or about 1150 Celsius so from our angle here looking into that it's really just a big glowing box it's very difficult to kind of see what's happening in there but the camera just sort of filters out some of the light and we get a good view of that inside opposite end of our piece so Dan's gonna start picking back up the top of this tree now a couple more final pieces to be added I still get another question online and asked if the connections between these objects they've been heated they've been connected if the connections are just as strong as if they were made from a solid mass now I would say in general no each connection has its potential for being a weakness in that material because of the bonding of those two elements together there's always a little bit of temperature difference between those two surfaces and so any kind of differential any kind of weakness that we put into the material whether it's a crease or like a jack line anything that would allow us to create a separation line and those joints are just as delicate as this now we are using the torch so we're getting some really good heat on that we're getting some pretty good bonding together so I would say if anything it's the size that might be a weakness like the little connections of the the wrists you know those kind of areas are also weaknesses in that piece anything that would have a dent in it or an impression or the start of a area to crack could potentially be a problem that's why we're also doing again a lot of heat maintenance being really conscientious about where those potential weaknesses might be and so especially in the final moments of the forming of this piece once we get all the pieces assembled we'll just spend some time flashing and torching flashing and torching allowing everything to sort of stabilize let the core be nice and stable so that it doesn't change shape once we put it into the oven but also to make sure that those little parts are kept warm you'll be doing a lot of flashing on that connections on the little tip of his nose on this little tail hanging out there because little booties gonna get too cold so we need to make sure all of that has enough temperature before we put it away to help hopefully avoid any of those weaknesses any of those potential problems but even when you're cooling it in the annealing oven all those different parts they start pulling and shrinking it different rates and so that's part of why all the maintenance the heat maintenance but also part of why we scheduled the downswing in a particular way that we do to assure that everything is taking into calculation all those little angles all those little connections all those thickness differences so that hopefully it would cool down without any cracks forming it is possible to have things not even when you come out of the oven but even much later sitting out on a table for weeks and all of a sudden something can pop and if it's not properly annealed or cooled down correctly the first time or giving those basic maintenance heats while you're forming the piece as well there's our lovely tree this was made yesterday so it already was cooled down and then brought back up to temperature but all those little parts were picked from a solid mass so again all of the parts that we're working with today are all stuffed cups and so the color was using solid bar color making little cups and then stuffing it full of clear and then taking those clear those combined masses and making each one of these individual objects and components and so we've got a nice dirt tree to add to the top now one of the things I really love about sculptural work as well is that you can ask 10 different glass workers to make a tree and they're gonna give you ten different versions of their interpretation of the tree so this is really where you get that artistic license coming up with the basic gestures the small components not too many people are working with photo realism and glass they're not trying to make exact copies there are some folks that do but a lot of times even those exact copies have just a little bit of that personality added by the artist so it's really fun to see all these parts come together so here's the top of our tree again really pushing it's it's really just the connection points that have been heated substantially to make sure that they're connected well together but we want the rest of the piece to be stable especially that stem or the trunk of the tree becomes a bit of a pivot point here so George is really careful about the maintenance watching how all the movement of this tree is a lot of different parts to keep track of straight on it's like it was turned on a lathe Jen says he could stop right there or we've got one more piece I think it's well worth taking the time to put on that extra piece we get a little bonus live stream here today now again we're working with Dan Friday if you'd like to check him out he's got a wonderful website and lots of social media activity Dan Friday or Friday glass comm we will also have images of this and some of the other work that he's been with us all week long making on the website Sima gorg Corning Museum of Glass org we also have of course Facebook Instagram all the social medias you can check out all the fun and exciting things that are happening here at the Museum but Dan's gonna be with us here until Friday so if you are in the local region highly suggest you come and hang out with us for a day or two some of this work is pretty thick so it won't be out for a few days but we already have a few of the items that we made with him earlier in the week some of his basket series are out and available to take a look at much of Dan's work is influenced by his family heritage the Lummi tribe up in Northwest the bear is his family symbol so he's it uses a lot of bears in his work a lot of owls a lot of nature that you see up in the northwest especially these trees are really a great addition to this repertoire dan comes also from a long line of craftsmen his great aunt was a basket maker that's what influenced him starting that basket series she has some of her items even in the Smithsonian but has been a long-standing member of the community and he said a few years ago when she passed he was really excited to start doing work in her honor and making some of that permanency from the basket patterns that the baskets themselves being made of organic materials would eventually disappear so of course as we all know glass doesn't really go anywhere so it's really wonderful to see him extend those designs those traditional designs in all of that basket wear so check out the website Friday glass comm and take a closer look at some of this fantastic work that we've been making here today and all the things that have led up to this residency here with Dan now we did have a question about the colors earlier online and do keep in mind some of the colors that you're seeing right now are fairly close to what they will be when they are cold that bear will have that same kind of milky luminosity to it you can see that kind of smokiness coming through now that it's getting just a little bit cooler the base is a really nice pink an amber color so that one's probably gonna be a little bit brighter and then this tree will stay as a nice dark green you want this one all right so we started leaving the whole the doors of the whole open a little bit we're getting to these final stages we got one more element to add our beautiful owl that's still in our garage over there but the rest of this piece needs to start really getting stable and when you get all these pivot points and all these different parts that means if you get the whole thing too hot everything will start moving from the weight of the glass and it's very difficult to get it all back on center so at this point it's just quick flashes maintenance of heat and trying to avoid getting any one part of this too hot to be moving going back into that garage now for our little owl once again the right side of this oven is a little bit colder than the left side you want me to turn that toward out torture don't want to catch our artists on fire here he's backing right up to a torch so Dan's gonna switch this over to the hot side it's always a delicate maneuver there many other things I really love to see on this particular piece and a lot of dance work is the signatures that he adds so at the very base of this piece there's a tiny little stamp and that's really his signature you might also see on some of the things online there's a bullseye effect Marini little different colors layered on top of each other it's also a calling card of Dan Friday you're from the Seattle area you might even actually see a few of those stickers around the city and he kind of leaves them a lot of places that he goes as well it's just been a signature of his for many years this bullseye imagery so once again a split team here tailors gonna start watching the owl as our hot shop team gets on that heat maintenance so this particular poem totem is probably going to be the biggest one he's ever made dan said earlier so we are real really maxing out the amount of glass that we are able to put on the end of the pole here this is one of the exciting things about bringing guests artists into this space with the team and a few extra people and the freedom to be able to explore they can really start to push exactly what they've been doing either in their own practice or trying new things so this particular design is something that Dan's been working on developing over the years and so it's great to have a few extra hands on deck to be able to really expand that make some nice tall work we find in general that when people come here to the museum and they see the big team in the big hole they're saying hey let's make this big thing so we always seem to get a lot of requests for large objects which is really exciting for us here at the Corning Museum of Glass dan as a professional artist was also very well prepared for this residency he showed up with a giant crate full of parts and components Morini and kane all the different things the tools the toys everything he would need to be able to really facilitate this which is a great use of his time if he would have shown up and had to pull all the Marini and all the cane and do all the prep work we would have still been pulling cane and Marini and getting him anything ready to be able to make any of the objects that we've already made this week so really thinking ahead really planning taking good advantage shows the professionalism and the experience that he has as a glass worker in the glass community being a glass artist really does require a lot of diversification it's very difficult to just make your own work all the time and be able to make a living so a lot of artists do diversify and start out with a lot of assisting roles maybe a lot of teaching roles and dan has definitely been one of those artists who works very very hard out in Seattle almost seven days a week working for a lot of different artists working full-time for the Chihuly team out there at the boathouse really starting to focus on his own work professionally here in the last 5 years or so this written really fun to watch that development and finally see little time in the Sun after so many years of working so hard all right the final pinnacle for our tree and our totem here today the little owl wise choice giving it just a few more seconds to set up other places and get that little bit hotter for that connection all right we're at that final final pinnacle now just the right heat just the right balance Nestle that little owl right onto the top of our tree all right and of course everyone has their cameras out getting those last minute photos and videos keep an eye on our website and all the social media for the team there'll be lots of images up of this exciting piece they're really taking a lot of time even with the smallest of details they can make a big difference you put all this time and effort into such a large piece and leaving a big chunk on the end or not cutting it off and the right heat if you get it too hot and burn the glass or if you cut it with dirty just dull shears it can leave a mark on the surface so even down to the final detail you really need to take your time make sure it's right now that we have this entire thing assembled he's gonna clean up the top of this owl and we just got a little time to once again return to that heat maintenance I keep mentioning this over and over but this is really a key thing to the success of this piece putting it together making all the parts that's really just part of the equation without having all the right temperatures glass does not like to cooperate in preparation we got Taylor here Taylor Ames has come from Seattle to work with Dan Friday they work together a lot out in Seattle so quite the dynamic duo here with us this week but he's getting already starting to get dressed up it's gonna be his job to put this piece away into the annealing oven allowing it to cool down really slowly and so we want to make sure that he's as comfortable as possible it's a lot of weight it's a lot of heat coming off of that piece and so we're gonna dress him up in all the silver suits here today so he's got a jacket on a hood and some heat protective gloves that will clothe him in there so allow him to not only grab hold of this piece but also stick his head and body into that 905 degree oven so it's a nice hot radiant heat and you could imagine how quickly you would catch on fire lose some hair if you're in there so we want to make sure that we protect him so he's nice and calm and can set this down in a very controlled fashion we're also here on the team that work working here at Corning of course we've got George Kennard being our strongman today really carrying this back and forth from the bench to the yoke takes a lot of time to get accomplished enough to really understand how glass moves and to be able to heat and keep everything on center as well as he's been doing for us here today so George has been working most probably the most senior member of our team working with glass for almost 30 years there's a lot of really wonderful experience and heads up a lot of our special projects here at the museum getting roped into lifting a lot of glass for us there we go and it's such a lovely shot of that piece now the connection this has to the pipe is pretty strong we wanted to have a nice sturdy stable base to be able to hold on to this piece the entire time when we get close to getting ready to break this free will start to narrow that down there's a question earlier about the the weaknesses in these pieces and the contact joints of course are a weak area but the connection between the punty and the piece that is always a classic connection that we want to break cleanly so it all gets a little bit exciting right here at the end but once again we'd like to thank everyone for tuning in online we had a lot of really wonderful questions from the global community here today we're glad to have you join us from all over the world to watch Dan Friday make this beautiful piece check out the social media got plenty of images that will be up and running over the next couple days to narrow down that piece we also have a small but mighty crowd here in the museum itself so I thank you all for joining us here at the Corning Museum of Glass throughout your day it's been a really special week working with dan once again he's gonna be here until Friday so if you are in the local area I highly suggest you stop in take a closer look at some of this amazing work he's been working on and watching him live action here with us in the amphitheater shop it's all hands on deck here for these critical last moments of the piece making sure it's got just the right temperature we don't want it moving around if we load it into this a kneeling oven and it's still moving it could cause a flat spot or cause the whole balance to be a little bit off this is really where a lot of this years of experience come in comes in for Dan recognizing the small little subtle changes and things that he sees in this glass to know where it's hot where it's not and how to balance it out and call exact timing on when to take it off the pipe those spot heat torches are really helpful in maintaining those deep those heats and also making sure using those torches for a lot of the sculpting that he did here today really allowing you to spot heat specific areas I really love the playful quality that all of these pieces have very nice gestural images with these animals so you can see every time they come back to the bench tailors getting right underneath it even when they're not ready to break it off he wants to be ready just in case a little bit of water on that connection thermally shocks the glass just a little bit light taps all it took now they're gonna spot heat that just a little bit and then we bring it over to our annealing oven for safekeeping they're short stairs so why you get so dressed up so you could take its time be nice and calm there we go Dan Friday and the team amazing amazing piece very nicely done very well coordinated what an amazing pinnacle piece of the residency [Music] you you you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Corning Museum of Glass

Views: 2,411,367

Keywords: Corning Museum of Glass, glass, glassmaking, glassblowing, guest artist, Dan Friday, glass sculpting, bear totem, glass demo, glassmaking demo, glassmaking demonstration, guest artist series

Id: bVF-lqf6K28

Length: 208min 47sec (12527 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 25 2018