Burchetta Press Releases - Wlmington NC Appreciation Day Sunday, March 1 2009

Glass Works

Staff photo by Allison Breiner

Mark Segal, right, applies another color to John Burchetta’s work-in-progress at Burchetta Glassblowing Studio and Gallery on Tuesday, Aug. 25.

by Marimar McNaughton
Thursday, August 27, 2009

Read the article online:
Lumina News - Glass Works

The bay door is open on the metal shed building at the corner of Second and Red Cross streets welcoming the passage of what cool breeze might be stirring on a late-morning thundercloud. Amplified music forges rhythmic beats that fan out across the parking lot propelled by gusts of hot air. Across the threshold, sculpted glass pieces silently invite visitors to wander indoors for free tours of Burchetta, the production glass blowing facility that relocated from West Chester, New York, to Wilmington, North Carolina, just shy of a year ago.

The formal entrance is a maze of showrooms—like styles grouped together: jewelry, perfume bottles, serving platters, bowls and vases—adjoining the warehouse—where a full inventory awaits the chirp of the fax machine signaling the arrival of some shipping instructions, sending the hand-crafted art objects into orbit. The studio, an inferno of furnaces and ovens lines the back wall beneath a bank of fans.

With a steel blow pipe, Elizabeth Miele is gathering a molten orange bulb from a raging 2200 degree Fahrenheit furnace. Miele is dressed in a sleeveless summer shift and thong sandals. On one arm she wears a tube sock, a shield against the blazing heat. Today she is making a set of glass tumblers, a farewell gift for Sarah Grenier, her summer intern, a visual arts graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts en route to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Miele and John Burchetta have been blowing glass together for years. Burchetta, two more to Miele’s 28 in the trade, in tank top and shorts, is pulling the tube sock over his right wrist up to his elbow, suiting up to blow a large ruffle bowl.

In its raw state, he palms a handful of cullet, chunks of broken West Virginia, Fenton crystal, stored in barrels. Rods of imported German glass, made from rare earth oxides—like pigments to paint are stored in open shelves.

Burchetta narrates the process from the first gather, an egg-sized bubble at the end of the blow pipe. Swinging the pipe from the studio’s hot side to its cool side, he blows the glass to twice its diameter, then centers and shapes the orb on the marver, a flat stainless steel surface, eliminating the bubble by rolling it on the table, until it resembles a cylinder. He swings the pipe back to the furnace to gather again, pivoting back to the marver to dip the hot glass into a trough of jade green shards. On the stainless, he rolls the glass bits into the vessel from side to side, lifting the pipe to round the top edges.

In between gathering and marvering, Burchetta may add color, or not, may blow the vessel, or not. He reheats the pipe in a separate chamber, set at 2500 degrees Fahrenheit, then at a seated bench, he straddles the pipe between two steel arms, rolling and centering the hot glass now about 1800 to 1900 degrees. Smoke rises from squared layers of wet newsprint that he rolls over the smooth surface. Wet parchoffi, a wooden scoop used for shaping the vessel and jacks like wooden tongs used for shaping the base, are submerged in a bucket of water.

On the next gather, Burchetta blows the egg-sized orb into a melon, reheating the pipe to maintain a steady temperature that will prevent the glass from cracking. There are two of these reheating chambers. In one, Miele works a punty preparing to drizzle molten pink glass over the bowl as Burchetta turns the pipe. Gathering again and returning to the bench, studio assistant Mark Segal welds tweezers, crimpers, shears and calipers used for stretching and measuring the vessel, pulling bubbles and snipping the end to create an opening. Burchetta shapes and Miele adds another layer of molten pink to the rim.

Burchetta returns the piece to the reheating chamber then swings the pipe over the open floor space, twirling the rod to open the face of the vessel, then downward as if brooming the pipe over the open floor space using centrifugal force to ruffle the vessel that blossoms like a flower. Swiftly, Burchetta and Segal rushed the finished piece to the annealer, a computerized cooling chamber, where the bowl will sleep overnight at 950 degrees, with the temperature lowered in increments until it’s ready to touch.

Watching in rapt attention is Carrie, Burchetta’s 16-year-old daughter.

"She could run the whole studio," he said proudly. She smiles. She made her first piece, a paperweight when she was five. Paperweights are the benchmark of the novice’s foray into glassblowing. Burchetta’s is a teaching studio with daily demos and weekend workshops.