What do you get when you combine a loud soundtrack, a couple of furnaces, and three men in constant motion on an indiscernible flight path, wielding long metal poles tipped with molten glass?
In almost any other case? Disaster.
At the Anchor Bend Glassworks studio, you get beautiful works of art—and the act of production is as visually appealing to behold as the end result.
A visit to the studio of this artists’ collaborative comprised of childhood friends Mike Richardson, Justin Tarducci, and Tim Underwood defies a simple description.
Imagine Hawaiian fire dancers (minus the grass skirts) spinning around a sauna while producing something far more enduring than a visual trail.
In most endeavors, the act of creation can make for dull entertainment. In some cases (see the sentence about fire dancers, above) it can even be awkward.
Not so at Anchor Bend, where the magic happens in a ground floor studio at the Mill at Shady Lea in North Kingstown. The furnaces ensure the artists are working in triple-digit temperatures at all times; but with more than six decades of experience between them, they’re used to sweating for their craft.
The three Newport natives met as teenagers, at an age where they were discovering that they shared the same taste in music and movies, art, creation, and glass.
Though all three principals collaborate on the design and production of their art, Mike, who graduated from St. Michael’s College in Vermont, manages the studio and devotes much of his energies to marketing and production support systems. Justin, who has been blowing glass since age 14, graduated from RISD where he studied the conceptual aspects of glass work and developed a distinctive style which he honed as an apprentice to local glass blowers including John Bolger Glass. Likewise, Tim apprenticed with several nationally recognized studios and artisans, and has developed an excellent reputation for his dynamic abilities while mastering the technical requirements of a production studio.
The art of glassblowing dates to the last century BCE, when it was discovered that inflation could be used to shape molten glass into vessels.
Within just a handful of years, a number of blowing techniques had been developed, including “free-blowing,” a process of inflating a quantity of molten glass at the end of a blowpipe with short busts of air; a process that at its core, has remained largely unchanged over the centuries. By controlling the cooling process and rotating and swinging the blowpipe, the skilled glass artist can create forms in a wide range of shapes.
Modern glassblowing (which happens at temperatures of just under 2000 degrees Fahrenheit) requires a furnace, which holds the molten glass prior to forming; a “glory hole”, which is used to reheat a piece in between production steps, and a third, called an annealer, which (at the Anchor Bend studio, at least) resembles a large dormitory refrigerator (albeit one that maintains a temperature of several hundred degrees.) It is used to slowly cool the glass over a period of as much as a few days, to prevent thermal stress damage.
On this day, the Anchor Bend artists are creating glass octopus sculptures. As it’s a design originally conceived by Justin, he’s taking the lead manning the gaffe and the glory hole, working the octopus head and eyes while Mike and Tim move between the furnace, the powder used to color the glass, and Justin’s workbench with the molten glass that will become the octopus legs, on a metal rod called a punty. They deliver each leg to the sculpture in a slow-moving, viscous stream, which is clipped, then deftly shaped into a curled tentacle. The glass hardens in a matter a seconds.
There’s no going back once the process has begun, from the initial shaping of the octopus head to the delivery of the completed sculpture to the annealer. “You’ve only got one chance to get it right,” Justin says. They somehow make it look easy—their moves are very practiced—producing about three sculptures each hour. “It takes months to refine a piece,” notes Mike, but even their skill and experience doesn’t protect their creations from thermal stress: at least two loud cracks are heard from the inside of the annealer during this visit, a common occurrence that is part of the process.
Since their establishment in 2003 and the opening of their Newport gallery, Anchor Bend has received numerous awards for their exceptional work. They also sell to wholesale clients, such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Newport Restaurant Group, which showcases their creations as votives and vases at their restaurants in Providence, Tiverton, Newport, and Narragansett. For more information, including the opening hours of their gallery at 16 Franklin St., Newport, visit www.anchorbendglass.com.
Save the date and see for yourself:
The Mill at Shady Lea, which the Anchor Bend Studio calls home, holds an annual open house the first week in December, the 5th and 6th this year. Come watch the Anchor Bend artists work, try your hand at glass blowing, and check out the other artists at Shady Lea. For more information, visit www.themillatshadylea.com.
Molten glass on the end of a metal rod known to glassblowers as a “punty.” At this stage in the process, the glass is nearly 2000 degrees.
Mike Richardson prepares colored glass to become one of the eight legs of an octopus sculpture, one of Anchor Bend’s signature pieces.
Mike Richardson spins the punty to elongate the glass, while Tim Underwood begins to prepare the next octopus leg.
Glass artist Justin Tarducci places a nearly-complete octopus sculpture in the “glory hole,” a furnace used by glassblowers to control the cooling process of glass while its being worked.