We stand just outside the garage door of his home studio. We stand on the edge of the heat watching the glassblower moving back and forth between the bench and the furnace. He carries a long rod, on one end is a hand; it's all very cannibalistic.
The glass skeleton hand droops as it liquefies in the two thousand degree heat of the glory hole. The long fingers slowly curl forward then, with a flip of the pipe, back, into an unnatural double-jointed wave. The bones glow devilishly orange and the glassblower whips it from side to side as it melts to keep it centered on the pipe. Evan Schauss has been blowing glass for thirteen years and his understanding of the unruly material seems clairvoyant. Just when the definition of the knuckles begins to fade and the fingertips flame red, he yanks it out of the furnace and sits down on the bench to sculpt. The molten glass is untouchable; instead of direct contact, he uses a bench full of interesting tools to guide the glass into the shapes he wants. Some of the tools are old favorites (the jacks and tweezers), some are steel contraptions he created in response to the needs of his art.
The artwork he creates begins with an image in his mind, a completed image of what he wants, and he thinks about it every day for months until he figures out how to make it. This often involves welding on additions to his hot shop to handle the unwieldy sculptures.
"It's cool to have a big idea and stick it through with the little details, but it's also cool to be creative in the moment and allow that to make art," he says of the process. "I know the probability of whether or not I can achieve my goal the first time, or if it will take a few tries. I think you can figure anything out, it just takes a good effort."
His current project involves a life size skeleton holding one mask up to it's face and another mask by it's side. This sounds complicated, each bone is a perfect replica of the real thing, but making something easy is not Evan's style. He worked for the masters of studio glass around the world for the better part of his 25 years and, like other second generation studio glassblowers, he wants to create something new and he won't be satisfied until he has. Right now he's intent on following the twist and turns of a dark tunnel down to the catacombs of human emotion and bringing back with him new ideas for his art, ideas no one else is going anywhere near in glass today.
The piece he works on before us now seems easy compared to the final pieces he plans for the series. But it's easy because he spent months working on the technical process: The hand will be attached to an arm using a hot button of glass; then the skeleton hand will pick up a flower out of a kiln.
In the final wall mounted piece the hand delicately grasps a long-stemmed flower between the pointer and thumb. The "Holding onto Life" series shows a place beyond vulnerability where despair was been exposed so long it became calcified. Life is fragile, it can slip out of your grasp and shatter; glass is the perfect material to express this idea.
The entire skeleton series, which will also include bodies, heads, and masks, is psychologically darker than most glass art.
"Freakish," one person says, describing the skeleton spine that bloomed into a flower with sharp black petals and a bloodshot eye staring out from the center.Freakish: Familiar parts put together in an unfamiliar way, and Evan Schauss's way happens to result in a total freakshow of plant and human anatomy. Known in his early days at Hilltop as the 'mad scientist of glass,' Evan continues his experimentation on Art.
Catch Evan Schauss and John Hogan at Bowling Green University giving glassblowing demonstrations all this week!
Fabulous work! Incredibly creative and challenging. What art is really all about.
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