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Roger Gandelman
Hand Blown Art Glass Perfume Bottles and Urns By
Email
deejay103@aol.com
A lifetime dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in the Hand Blown Art Glass Perfume Bottle
Unique, art glass sculpture, incorporated into a contemporary, elegant, hand blown art glass perfume bottle or cremation urn.
Perfect gift for a selective collector, art lover, or your love.
Bottles can be modified to be hand blown art glass memorial cremation keepsake urns.
Glass blowing is a craft and an Art...Fine art glass perfume bottles are a passion. ...small sculptures to warm the heart.
My work is available to individuals, as well as wholesale outlets.
The work is all made by hand, no two exactly the same, one of a kind. Blown Glass perume bottles and cremation urns, to be cherished. I work on a vial until the bright colored flower decoration appears perfect to me.....the form elaborate...elegant, yet understated ...a paradox...sculptural artwork hidden in a subtle fuctional form.
Hand blown art glass is like no other medium. It shimmers, speaks, calls to you in it's fluid movement. Hand blown glass, once molten, is frozen in time but still vibrant...gorgeous, with a smooth tactile presence that enjoys being touched. Hand blown art glass is a unique treasure, like fine jewelerly. When one holds a piece of art glass, one knows it is special creation.....not jusr craft, but a work of art..Art Glass Sculpture..a mastercraftsman's gift to the world.
The bottles can be altered to house cremation ashes, and given to family members as memorial keepsake cremation urns, to be placed in their homes, an object of beauty, to be cherished for it's eternal beauty, as well as the eternal contents within.
My work is shown in art galleries, art shops, craft shops, glass galleries, art shows, as well as major craft shows around the country. Seen on a pedistal in a museum, as well as someone's living room, bathroom, diningroom, hallway, bedroom, or the hand of a lovely lady who has just recieved a gift from a loved one, her eyes bright as she views her unusual gift. Glass sculpture.
I am an American Glass Artist...I have been a glass artist for my entire adult life. As a glass artist, I try to make my creations unusual and uniique, not just functional. Mt glass creations are glass sculpture sized down to the prescious objects I crave to produce...bright with energy that only art glass can dislplay...imaginative, vibrant,....glass sculptures,..glass artwork,...interesting objects...a gift...you deside.
Decorative perfume bottles made by a glass artist,..It is a perfect gift for glass collectors, as well as something to be treasured for a hand blown art glass Xmas gift, hand blown art glass mothersday gift, blown glass valentinesday gift, art glass birthday gift, hand blown art glass graduation gift, art glass wedding gift, blown glass perfume bottle bridesmaid gift, hand blown art glass Channukah gift, or just a thoughtful present to make your daughter or wife smile.
Pottery, jewelery, metal sculptue,stained glass, kaleidoscopes, wood, fabric, and painting all have their wonderful place in a gallery,...but the section with the glass art has a magic glow to it, and draws ones attention in a very special way. Glass sculpture.
Be it a blown glass gift, art glass gift, or an addition to ones personal collection, these pieces will sparkle their brilliant pristine message, and satisfy the most critical eye. Rich ruby red, warm cobalt, midnight black, ocean blue, sea green, sensual purple, youthful pink....a blown glass perfume bottle in all stlyles...
Shops looking for wholesale art glass, wholesale perfume bottle , whloesale hand blown art glass perfume bottles, wholesale art glass vases, wholesale blown glass vases, wholesale blown glass, or wholesale blown glass perfume bottle glass should email me for a pricelist.
I am presently working on many things. If you are looking for a art glass vase, art glass paperweight, and blown glass ornement, art glass sculpture, or blown glass tumblers, I will be showing many new creations.
Memorial Keepsake Cremation Urns
All of the work on the site can be slightly altered to house cremation ashes. Art Glass Keepsake memorial cremation urns are a very special way to keep a small amount of cremation ash encased in the timeless beauty of the frozen molten glass....both eternal.
Unlike hardwood cremation urns, metal,and bronze cremation urns, art glass cremation urns do not tarnish or require polish or cleaning.
A keepsake blown glass cremation urn is a very thoughtful gift to be presented to members of the family....a small object that speaks of a lifetme spent....a glass keepsake cremation urn is a personal treasure to be pasted down to generations to come....a small art object who's contents is cherished, making it much more than art....a familly airloom...to be kept for generations .
Because the desiign is nonsectarian, these blown glass cremation urns serve well as Catholic cremation urns, Protestant glass cremation urns, Baptist glass cremation urns, Russian Orthodox blown glass cremation urns, Jewish art glass cremation urns, Hindu art glass cremation urns, Buddhist cremation urns, or any other religious sect.
A blown glass keepsake memorial cremation urn gifted to a loved one is a gift that will touch their heart..
Making Glass Flowers by Roger Gandelman
Glassline Magazine 2009
Back when we were 4 years old, scampering around on a sunny spring afternoon, enjoying all the magic sights and smells that older folks tend to take for granted, we would see flowers. They looked beautiful to us all. We liked dandelions as much as roses. Dad didn't like dandelions, but we did. When we looked at flowers, we had no thoughts of Mothers Day, of funerals, of brightening up the kitchen, or of centerpieces at weddings. We all just thought they are a wonderful part of this new world we were exploring.
My point is, we did not have to learn to appreciate flowers. We understood their beauty completely at the dawn of our lives. Flowers were not contemporary, traditional, or abstract. They were all perfect. We liked dandelions!
When I was 25 years old, I was in a small gallery in my hometown, New Haven, Ct., looking to buy a gift for my best friend
While hopelessly glancing at the objects in the gallery, my eyes fell on a display of vases. I had never seen Art Glass before and was astounded. The vases had beautiful flowers encased in the glass. I remember thinking that these vases were the most beautiful things I had ever seen. That 4 year old boy in my head got very excited. He liked what he was looking at. It looked like springtime.
I could not afford to buy the vase for my friend, but he ended up with some nice goblets. A week later, I enrolled in a night class in glass blowing at Southern Connecticut University. At that point in my life, as I previously mentioned, I had no real sense of aesthetics....I just wanted to make flowers. I wanted to make them warm, lush, and vibrant as I remembered them in my youth; back in the days when I did pay attention to such things.
I had no idea what a huge door I was opening up when I sent myself down the yellow brick road of floral art glass. The possibilities are endless. Is it labor intensive? Yes. The more work you put into it, the better your flowers get.
Question: Does any body care?
Answer: Yes and no (nothing is ever simple)
I do off hand glass blower. I am a furnace worker. The trend in my field today is Venetian techniques. Everyone is having a great time picking up canes, making huge vases, bowls, and platters. The results are stunning. There also are a lot of people rolling the piece in various frits and powders, getting great results. That is what the colleges are teaching, and the students leave college incredibly skilled in these techniques. The galleries and collectors understand and appreciate the work, and are used to looking at it. It is wonderful stuff and they want it. That is what is happening now.
But when people walk into my booth at a show, more often than not, they look surprised. They get the same expression on their face that I had when I first saw the vases in the small gallery in New Haven, Ct. That was thirty years ago.....Flowers are timeless. They ignore trends.
In the contemporary craft world, florals are frowned on by many. But I find that most people get past their adult artistic preferences and view my work threw the eyes of the 4 year old child. They say,” Your flowers are beautiful."
Making flowers
As I said earlier, I am a furnace worker. I understand that most of the readers of the article are lamp workers. I use a torch at the bench to apply my flowers to the first gather of my perfume bottle. These techniques are for applying glass to a surface to decorate it. They are not for creating stand alone 3 dimensional flowers. I am not an accomplished lamp worker. I taught myself how to use a torch to make my flowers. If I lived on Planet Lamp Worker, I would have to live in a refrigerator box. That being said, the information in this piece may inspire some young souls to mix these techniques into their creative process.
Back in the 70's, the most common flower was the 4 petal pulled flower. You put a glob of opaque glass on the piece, heat it, squash it down so it is round and flat, and using an ice pick type tool with a perpendicular bend at the end, pull toward the center four times. You now have 4 round petals. You can leave it like that or pull out 4 times to make the ends of the petals pointed. After that, you can clean the center up by snipping the point where your pulls meet, or pushing them in. Melt all this smooth, maybe marver a little. It sounds very simple, but it takes practice to execute this well; so the flower is graceful and not all smushy looking. Remember, the beauty of a flower is that it is perfect. You don't want to have 3 good petals, and one burned out, off center, nasty looking petal. You may think it is ok because it is hand made and there is a lot of variation in nature. Yes, there is variation in nature and that is natural. Unfortunately, your work is not nature. Your ugly petal just looks ugly. Learn how to do it right. I have faith in you. Just undertaking the incredibly difficult task of blowing glass should show you that you are capable of conquering anything with practice.
That is the basic pulled flower. It looks alright, but it usually looks flat and lifeless. The four year old boy will not get excited by this. You must use your magic to give it life. You can roll your opaque color in various frits (try different sizes), opaque or transparent. Or, when you squash your opaque blob down in the beginning, squash it on the frit or powder. Do this before you pull the flower so the frit will pull out naturally (just like in nature..happy four year old boy).
Put something in the center of the flower: a murini, a small dot of color, ect. Make sure it looks perfect. Do not mess up the quality of your beautiful flower with some mushy, overlapped murrini that looks like it has been out drinking all night. Do not stick something meaningless there. Take every small step of your flower seriously. It will be only as beautiful as its weakest visual point
You could make the opaque blob more elaborate by using an optic mold before or after rolling it in the frit or powder. It is usually best to marver it smooth before you apply it to the piece. You could spend your whole life playing with the variations of the pulled flower: more petals, less petals, pull each petal in a little bit instead of making them pointed, etc..
You can make flowers using canes and a torch to torch each petal on one at a time. The trick here is to breathe life into your petals by making elaborate canes. "Beautiful canes makes beautiful glass". Put that slogan up on the wall in your studio. It is the key to how beautiful your work will be (that and thousands of hours worth of experience). Do not skimp on how much thought, energy, and time you put into your canes. Make the cane with opaque glass. Before you pull the cane out, encase the surface with frits, powders, overlays or any other technique you may have accumulated in your never ending quest to make glass look extraordinary. Most tests you do will give you unsatisfactory results. Many of the exterior colors break up when you torch them on. The more experiments you do, the more things you try, the more successes you will accumulate, and the more your arsenal of unusual petals will fill up, giving you a variety of flowers to construct an interesting, natural looking finished piece. And when you finish that piece, you will look at it just before you put it away. You will get a feeling of satisfaction and maybe nod your head just a bit. And just like the four year old boy, you will think "beautiful". The feeling doesn't last long, but it is why we do this.
Floral Design
I would like to start this section with a little harsh reality. Due to the fact that reality was the last thing I was searching for when I was in my twenties, it took almost a decade for me to realize the following two points:
#1 Anyone with manual dexterity and coordination can learn to get glass hot and control it if they have the equipment, time, and persistence. You do not get an award for accomplishing this task. Confetti does not start dropping from the ceiling of your shop. The clowns do not start climbing threw your windows, handing you free puppy dogs and making balloon animals.
You need to concentrate on design.
#2 Anyone can make something and call it beautiful. It takes talent to make something others consider beautiful. (My pompous art teacher told me that back in the early 70's. He was wearing a beret. I hated him)
You need to concentrate on design.
I saw a glass blower at show who made really complicated, well executed, difficult forms. The interior decoration, however, was a bunch of garish frit that would give some poor women nightmares if she took it home and put it in her lovely bedroom. The glass blower really hadn't given much thought to the colors he chose to encase in his work. This is an example of a glass blower who learned to blow glass and then thought he was done.
You need to concentrate on design.
Enough reality. It is there waiting for me in my mail box every day. Let's talk about flowers again.
I think the two main things I would like to discuss here is space and color.
Space) Some of the floral work that I have seen that seems unsuccessful to me is too cluttered. I was in a marble maker's booth recently and noticed he was really slick with his techniques. Then I noticed a few large marbles that had some nice flowers in them. The only problem (understatement) was that the background for the flowers was frit, dichroic, lattacino in two or three colors, star murrinis, and vines. They were nice flowers and were larger than the other elements in there, so I was sure they were suppose to be the main theme of the marble. The problem was you couldn't see them with all the other fireworks going on. And this man was a very good glass blower. But there was no design to his work. Just a lot of technique.
I can only tell you how I design my work. I am still trying to get it right to satisfy my eye (and the eyes of others: Reality #2). When I finally get it right, I can die. There are many other ways to use flowers in your designs, but you may find these words useful.
I try to never have a background that is to busy. I have seen people pull it off, but it never worked for me.
Sometimes I will have two layers of decorations. On these pieces, I go light with the number of flowers on each layer. My most unsuccessful work has been pieces with too many flowers, too cluttered. I have seen beautiful work done with murrini flowers where there are hundreds of them on a piece, and I have seen the work of the modern master paperweight makers who also are able to use an unlimited number of flowers in their work. But for my work, I need space. You decide for yourself. But at least give it some thought. Don't just stick a bunch of flowers in there anywhere you happen to go with your cane. Concentrate on design.
It works better if you do not have all your flowers the same size (understatement).
If you are going to put vines in, it is usually (not always) better if they make some sense. Let them flow on your piece in a manner that you planned before hand, keeping in mind the need for space.
Color) When I am trying out new designs, my worst failures are pieces that come out what I call "cartooney" (spell check does not like this word). Cartooney is when the colors are too bright or plasticky (another word that doesn't exist). I want my flowers to blend in with the earth like real flowers do; not look like they belong on an episode of South Park. But that is my personal preference. You may want to take the South Park route and end up with the clowns and free puppies.
The only way you will find the best color combinations is by making many different canes and by trying many different color combinations. Eventually you will have a pallet of colors you are familiar with. You will then be able to design your work easily, knowing which flowers look well together.
1st Rule of Glass Flower Club: Concentrate on design
2nd Rule of Glass Flower Club: Concentrate on design
I am sure you can figure out the third rule.
I am going to stop here. I would like to make a point about my words of wisdom. I am a self taught glass artist with thirty years experience. You can decide the value of my words. Ignore me if you like. I am a father, so I am used to it. But I know what I consider beautiful. It wakes up the child in me. Even so, I am very critical of my work. When I make a new design that I think is wonderful, usually, not always, I get a decent response from my galleries and the art show patrons. But when I make a floral bottle that, to me, seem too bright, too subdued, or too busy, there is always someone who comes into my booth and chooses that piece over all the other ones I am showing... Always. People view your work through their little child, and he may not play well with yours.
Art Glass has been my soul passion for the better part of my life. Since that first day I saw the blown glass floral vases in that little New Haven, Ct. gallery, few things have mattered more to me. Few people understood why. If you are reading this article, you understand. We are very lucky to have found this passion.
Art Glass...what a glorious thing.
Roger Gandelman
Dedicated to the memory of Richard Gandelman
I never could fill his shoes, so he gave me wings.
