A blast with glass

Art lovers will have an opportunity to learn the fundamentals of glass blowing with veteran glass-smith and Sawdust exhibitor Loren Chapman in a hands-on workshop this weekend as part of the Sawdust Festival’s Spring Into Art workshop series.

Spring Into Art offers a wide variety of media including painting in acrylics and oils, fabric collage, mixed-media collage, watercolor painting, ceramics, flower arranging and more.

Internationally renowned for his abstractionist “free-form” approach to glass blowing, Chapman creates organically shaped and colorful iridescent vases adorned with silhouetted shapes at the top of each piece.

“Each piece tells a story, usually something to do with nature,” he said. “I just see what comes out of what I’m creating and then I name it.”

The images that result have earned the works names like “Mother, Father, Child,” “First Kiss” and “Elephant Seal.” Each piece is sold with its personal story and the steps taken to create it.

During his workshop, Chapman will teach his students about safety, the basic use of tools, the method of gathering and reheating the molten material in the furnace (it’s 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit), shaping and cooling on the marver, how to blow out the glass with the blowpipe and work the tools of the bench.

“Each student will take away from the experience the basic steps to blowing glass, and two pieces they made themselves,” Chapman said. “I’ll make sure they are safe and am there to talk to them through the process, but I give my students full control of the pipe so what they make is all theirs.”

Although only clear glass will be used in the beginner’s workshop, Chapman will explain the process of adding oxides and carbonates of metal to create color, and the mixture of stannous chloride, water and hydrochloric or muriatic acid to create iridescence.

Embarking on his 40th year in the trade of this early Roman art form, Chapman began his art career as a wood sculptor in the early 1970s.

The transition to glass blowing, he said, came from a plethora of ideas that couldn’t be executed quickly enough with sculpture, something he realized while studying the latter medium at the Brooks Institute of Fine Art in Santa Barbara, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 1972 and later a master’s degree in glassmaking in 1975.

“With glass blowing, once you start a piece, you can’t put it away,” he said. “This allows me to go through many ideas in one day of work.”

The Spring Into Art series will run through the last weekend of March, and will offer an array of classes with various local artists at 935 Laguna Canyon Road.