SIUSLAW NEWS | WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2019 | 5A
GLASS from page 1A
she works almost full time at
the gallery. Ocean Beaches
moved to its current studio
location, which is a larger gal-
lery directly in front of their
first studio, in 2007. Meyer of-
ficially resigned as pharmacy
manager in 2008.
“It wasn’t really a retire-
ment thing, it was more that,
once I started doing this and I
knew how much I enjoyed it,
it would be preferable to me,”
Meyer said. Now, his work
can be found in galleries up
and down the Oregon coast,
including here in Florence at
The River Gallery.
After a full career in health-
care, Meyer found a new pas-
sion and successfully pursued
it. He spends his days now
creating unique pieces such as
lamp shades, decorative glass
bulbs, vases and really any-
thing he can imagine.
“It’s one of those things that,
medicine and being a phar-
macist, you work with your
brains more than your hands,”
Meyer said. “With glass, I was
able to sit back and look at
what I’ve made. You don’t get
that same feedback out of re-
ally anything in healthcare. It
was a nice change for me.”
The history of glass blow-
ing dates back about 2,000
years ago, when the Phoeni-
cians set up the birthplace of
glassblowing in what is now
Lebanon and Israel, as well
as Cyprus. Glass bottles and
tubes have been excavated
from Jerusalem dating back to
37 B.C., placing large histori-
cal and archeological signif-
icance on glassblowing. The
spread of the Roman Empire
also helped spread glassblow-
ing as it was greatly supported
by the Roman government,
with commercial glass blow-
ing really beginning during
the reign of Augustus, from
27 B.C. to his death in 14 A.D.,
according to the American
Journal of Archaeology.
Glassblowing
essentially
explores the ability of glass to
be inflated to create bulbs and
rounded shapes. Molten glass
is wrapped around the end of a
blowpipe, a hollow metal rod.
The glass blower then blows
into the blowpipe, inflating
the glass like a balloon, but at a
much slower rate. From here,
the glassblower can work the
glass into any desired shape,
from bowls to balls to vases.
Meyer said there have been
some modern changes in
glassblowing, such as the for-
mulas for colored glass. The
biggest changes, he said, have
been in heating technology,
such as newer electric furnac-
es as opposed to gas furnaces.
Overall, however, he said “the
whole basis for glassblow-
ing really is pretty much the
same.”
The technique of heating,
blowing and shaping the glass
has remained the same since
it was created 2,000 years ago.
For Meyer’s workshop, clear
glass from Germany is kept
melted in a ceramic bowl at
a continuous 2,050 degrees
inside a large, matte-grey elec-
tric furnace. Meyer uses what’s
called a punty, which is a met-
al rod, to dip into the bowl of
clear glass inside the furnace.
Once the clear glass is on the
punty, he takes it out of the
furnace so the glass cools a lit-
tle and doesn’t melt off.
In order to add color, he dips
the clear glass blob into what’s
called frit, which is crushed
colored glass pieces — think
large sprinkles but made of
glass. Each color sticks to the
clear glass and Meyer dips the
clear glass blob into a different
color on each side.
Next he sets the punty with
the colored/clear glass blob
into a smaller furnace, called
a glory hole, that looks like a
large cylinder turned on its
side with a hole on the front,
where the blowpipe and pun-
ty can fit through. Similar to
temperatures the electric fur-
nace reaches, the glory hole
essentially reheats the glass, as
it’s kept at 2,300-2,400 degrees.
This type of furnace became
widely used in the U.S. when
studio glass blowing became
popular in the 1960s. The
name refers to a term used by
gold miners who referred to
veins of gold as “glory holes.”
Bob Meyer blows glass at
his studio, Ocean Beaches
Glassblowing in Seal Rock.
VICTORIA SANCHEZ/SIUSLAW NEWS
There are doors at the end
of the glory hole that can
open to make more space for
larger projects to fit inside.
Meyer lets the colored glass
soften into the clear glass in-
side this smaller furnace while
he retrieves the blowpipe. He
then removes the punty from
the glory hole and allows the
colored glass to drip onto
the blowpipe, which he then
twirls, spiraling the colored
glass onto the blowpipe.
“This allows the colors to
flow in and out of each other,”
Meyer said. Now the project is
ready to be blown.
Meyer works through a re-
petitive series of putting the
blowpipe into the smaller fur-
nace where the glass warms
up, removing the blowpipe
and rolling the glass at the
end on a metal table to form
its shape, then returning it to
the smaller furnace to warm
the glass up again. Once it
starts taking shape, he blows
into the blowpipe, creating a
balloon shape at the bottom,
and this allows him to craft
whatever shaped object he is
looking for.
“You know some glass
blowers actually go to college
for this and learn about art
theory. My approach doesn’t
ever start from an artistic per-
spective,” Meyer said. “The
way my mind works from
being in science-related fields
is that I’ll do a series of ex-
periments with various color
combinations and then I’ll
look at it to see which ones
look the most interesting. I’ve
gone through a lot of different
color combinations. The ones
we have now are the ones that
have proven to be most popu-
lar over time.”
Rows of colored glass balls,
or “floats,” in more than 100
color combinations line the
upper part of the gallery, di-
rectly behind the viewing
area where visitors can watch
Meyer blow glass every Friday
through Sunday in the after-
noons until around 5 p.m.
There are two other glass-
blowers that also use the stu-
dio during the week.
Glass floats are common in
glass galleries along the coast
and they have a historical sig-
nificance to fishermen from
the past.
These glass bulbs that seem
indicative of the Oregon coast
are actually modeled after the
floats that fishermen would
use for their fishing nets. Mey-
er says Japanese fishermen
specifically would use glass
for their floats back in the late
1800s because glass doesn’t get
waterlogged like wood. Even-
tually plastic came to replace
the glass floats.
“A lot of the floats would
break loose from the fisher-
men’s nets. There’s this cur-
rent that circles the Pacific
Ocean so some floats are still
travelling in that current from
Japan. Occasionally a few get
spit out and they wash up
on our beaches,” Meyer said.
“Back in the ‘60s it was really
common to find floats on the
beach.”
He added that’s why a lot of
these glass floats are sold in
galleries along the beach.
“The floats are interesting
to me. You can see that the
shapes are the same and ev-
erything, but the way these
are different is that each one
is a different canvas that you
can do whatever you want on,”
Meyer said. “As far as the col-
ors, there’s a movement of the
colors. You can add texture
to them. You can do all sorts
of things. Within those con-
fines of a six-inch sphere, you
can really do a lot of creative
things.”
Once the piece is complete
in shape, Meyer carefully cre-
ates a break at the top of the
piece where it’s attached to the
blowpipe, removes the piece
and places it into an annealer
— which looks like a large, sil-
ver freezer one might keep in
the garage, except it keeps the
finished glass pieces warm. If
the glass cools too fast, it will
crack.
“There’s a lot of stress in the
glass because it’s been reorga-
nized and everything. From
the range of 940 degrees to
about 700 degrees F, the an-
nealer is relieving all those
stresses in there,” Meyer said.
“So if you don’t give the glass
enough time with that an-
nealing, it might make it all
the way to room temperature
without cracking, but it might
crack the next day or the next
year. Some people have even
had them crack 10 years later
just from poor annealing.”
The pieces spend about six
hours between this 940- to
700-degree range, and then
the annealer turns off so the
glass continues to cool at a
faster rate.
According to Meyer, some
of the favorite pieces he’s made
have been ones that have sur-
prised him. When making a
vase, glassblowers swing the
piece while it’s attached to
the blowpipe so it stretches,
creating the neck of the vase.
“With this one piece, it just
kept stretching. Even after
I stopped swinging,” Meyer
said, and the final piece was
a round, cream bulb with a
neck standing about four feet
tall, evocative of a green onion
but with cream stalks instead
of green. It’s now displayed in
the left entryway window of
the gallery.
Meyer says he’s practiced
enough with glassblowing
now that he gets more burns
from his oven at home than
from glassblowing, and that
with every piece, he continues
to learn.
“Glassblowers can get just
about done and all of a sud-
den it can shatter or you drop
the piece on the floor, and
that happens a fair amount. I
think if you get frustrated, it’s
the kind of thing that weeds a
lot of people out early on. It’s
kind of like quarterbacks and
football. If they throw a few
bad passes and they get down
about it, they’re never going to
make it,” Meyer said. “Same
thing here. I convinced myself
early on that if I messed up
a piece, as long as there was
something I could learn from
it, then it was worthwhile, and
that’s invariably been the case.”
Ocean Beaches Glassblow-
ing is located at 11175 NW
Pacific Coast Highway in
Seal Rock. More informa-
tion about the gallery can be
found at www.oceanbeaches
glass.com. Meyer’s work can
be found locally at The River
Gallery, 1335 Bay St. in His-
toric Old Town Florence.
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