Bending Light: The Art of Creating Neon
It was a gusty autumn evening in 1977, and David Ablon — long-haired, fresh-faced, and in his second year of art school — was speeding down an empty highway road in upstate New York. Hands gripping the steering wheel of his blue Chevy Bel Air, Ablon slowed as he passed a small building with a big orange sign that read Wellsville Motel. Each neon letter shone bright against the grey sky, but the last L didn’t. Staring at it, David had a thought, and pulled in.
The motel’s owner was baffled. This young kid wanted to fix his broken L? Well, why not. David took the letter down and sped back to his college’s neon studio.
Two days later, that L — “so simple in its curvature and so beautiful,” says Ablon — joined its fellow orange letters atop the motel. A $20 bill was slapped into the 21-year-old’s palm. “I think I was even more surprised that I got it to work than [the owner] was,” he says.
Thirty-six years and countless glass bends later, David Ablon is a neon maestro. He’s the president of Tecnolux (the American arm of the largest manufacturer of neon products worldwide) and the owner of Precision Neon (they light top-notch establishments and restaurants like the Odeon and Balthazar). And, he’s a partner at Brooklyn Glass, a year-old glass blowing and neon workshop space in Park Slope, Brooklyn. This is where David spends most of his time — teaching his sold-out neon classes, hanging with the glassblowers, and making neon magic, daily.
— Sky Dylan-Robbins