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Where Robert Frost saw likely causes for the end of the world, others see the striking beauty of blown glass. Glass is formed in fire—the furnace is maintained at 2100 degrees Fahrenheit—and retains heat in the brilliant colors encased in its ice-like surface. It is as if the northern lights were suspended inside a glacier. Art glass combines the intensity of fire with the coldness and clarity of ice to create a beauty matched only in precious gemstones.
Jesse Bogenrief is familiar with fire—as he is with the art glass industry in general. His parents are leaders in the construction and installation of stained glass and are world renowned for their “lady windows,” glass portraits in the art nouveau style of Alphonse Mucha, and for their Tiffany-style lamps and installations. Jesse grew up (and up—he stands six-foot-eight and seems taller) surrounded by a world of brilliantly colored pieces of glass, which he learned to transform into jigsaw puzzles of light. By age twelve, he was working in the family business and developing an appreciation for what he calls the “dance partnership” between glass and light.
Jesse was seven when he discovered fire and the thrill of blowing glass. On a vacation with his family, he took a brief class at a shop in Omaha and made his first piece of blown glass, an experience he never forgot. Twenty years later he branched out from the family stained glass business by constructing his own furnaces and setting up a glassblowing shop in the small Iowa town of Merrill. Today his expanded studio occupies a former post office building in Spencer, Iowa.
Heat turns glass into a liquid, a fact that the Romans understood from the flow of molten lava out of a volcano. It was Phoenicians who lived within the Roman Empire who discovered about two thousand years ago that a puff of air could be used to inflate a blob of hot glass, forming a sphere that could then be stretched and turned into almost any shape. Today Jesse Bogenrief brings a piece of glass to life by employing a process that the skilled artisans of Murano, Italy, had already perfected by the time of Galileo. This continuity is one of the things that Jesse says he likes about glassblowing, that an Italian master more than half a millennium ago was doing things the same way that he is doing them now.
The art of glassblowing requires heating the glass to make it liquid and malleable, reheating it between steps in a second furnace known as the “glory hole,” then slowly removing the heat to preserve the piece’s shape and prevent breakage caused by thermal stress. This cooling down period lasts at least overnight and is accomplished in a third, “annealing,” oven that is maintained at 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Although the heat may be gradually removed, the fire remains encased as color within the sparkling glass.
The color comes from metal, small pieces of which are embedded between layers of glass, then stretched into complex patterns through a variety of techniques. The addition of color is accomplished by rolling the almost-liquid glass in the powdered metal on a work surface known as a marver table. Bogenrief’s table is stainless steel, like the rod or “blowpipe” that holds the molten glass, but they were originally made of marble, from which their name, a corruption of the French “marbre,” is derived. Like the shape of the glass itself, the swirls and points of colored light that it can contain are limited only by the imagination of the glassblower.
Jesse Bogenrief has an abundance of imagination, and he is quick to point out that the freedom to dream in space and color is one of the allures of glassblowing. “You can make anything out of it,” he says, “any shape in any combination of colors.” As is true of most glassblowers, Bogenrief’s first creations were functional objects like bowls and vases, which grew increasingly complex in both shape and color as he developed his skills. The technical mastery and creativity of these early pieces earned Jesse a reputation as an emerging artist in the medium of glass.
Bogenrief’s passion for the possibilities he sees in glass have led him into the construction of larger sculptural pieces of the sort defined by the “studio glass movement” that began in the United States in the 1960s.
Although he continues to produce traditional objects for his devoted patrons, Bogenrief’s passion for the possibilities he sees in glass have led him into the construction of larger sculptural pieces of the sort defined by the “studio glass movement” that began in the United States in the 1960s. His most recent works take their inspiration from nature—its visible beauty and its deeper hidden structure. A recent installation at the Cherapa Place in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is a swirl of prairie flowers soaring toward the ceiling in the double helix shape of DNA. Another new piece, commissioned by a college in Fort Dodge, Iowa, is a twenty-eight foot high double helix of glass that measures five feet in diameter. And a large-scale project in Hawaii is in the works, inspired by the lush beauty of Hawaii’s tropical flowers and plants. Explaining the inspiration for his recent work, Bogenrief says that he is struck by how much glass reminds him of nature, what he calls “the flow of life—how things are formed and flow one into another.”
Bogenrief is also attracted to the spontaneity of glassblowing, which sets it clearly apart from the slower-paced work of his parents in stained glass. Although the glass can be reheated and reworked, there is an immediacy involved in the shaping and coloring of each piece that is evident in the exaggerated movements of the glassblower. Watching Bogenrief at work in his studio, shaping and cutting and twirling hot glass on the end of his rod, it is easy to see the heat of the furnace reflected in the passion of the artist. The fire is not only in the glass—it is glowing in Jesse Bogenrief as well.
Credits
by Robert Hilderbrand
