photo: courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/MyGlassOdyssey
From a structural standpoint, John Waterman’s “My Glass Odyssey” is the polar opposite to today’s fast-cutting, nonstop action movies. The film moves systematically (at times ploddingly) from city to city, and Waterman asks every artist he encounters along the way a very similar battery of questions. The film, which won silver awards at the Honolulu and Las Vegas film festivals this year, starts in Boca Raton, Florida, at artist Jim Thibeaux’s T-Boca Hot Glass. Thibeaux describes how his girlfriend came back looking bedraggled from a college glassblowing class in 1973. The more she described the class’s “third-world studio,” the intense heat of the furnace and the glass, the more his interest was piqued. “It’s been a love affair ever since,” he says.
Thibeaux’s chapter seems to close rather abruptly—he’s shown making a Chihuly-esque chandelier for a former student who helped him raise seed money for his shop, and then it’s on to New Orleans. Waterman asks every artist about their studio spaces, how they got into glass, how they think about their own work, and whatever projects they’re currently undertaking. Among the artists’ stories are experiences of joy (a father and daughter who have been blowing glass for a year as a way to spend time together) as well as loss (Spiro Lyon Arts of Carbondale, Colorado, who persevered despite losing their entire studio to an electrical fire). Watching each artist at work is spectacular: in Los Angeles, Martin Janecky (who’s been working with glass since he was thirteen) employs remarkable muscle memory in the creation of a small glass horse that speaks to his nearly twenty years of experience; in Lincoln City, Oregon, Kelly Howard and Jonathan Myers‘ three- and six-year-old children perform every task short of gaffing; in Richmond, Virginia, Steve Sizelove blows impossibly thin-necked vessels, and there’s a wonderful sequence in which he teases out a neck that looks as supple and pliant as a long strand of honey.
The film poster for the documentary.
But as the film moves from city to city, the interview questions begin to sound very similar; the stories are different but the artists don’t conceal their joy. A love of “working with my hands” becomes the shared mantra, and the sincerity of feeling begins to compensate for this repetition. This recalls Waterman’s intention for making the film in the first place. In the opening, he describes being inspired to move from the east coast to LA after the passing of his uncle, whom he greatly loved and admired. As he tells it on the film’s website, “My uncle worked with his hands… He was a printer, had his own shop, and was his own man.” Every artist in the film recites a sort of artist-origin story, and every one of these stories offers tactile details as an explanation for glassblowing’s allure.
What “My Glass Odyssey” might be suggesting is that this initial tactile excitement is a shared, almost religious experience among glassblowers. And every segment ends with a piece going off to the annealing oven, to say that while techniques may differ every process is essentially the same. A few of the featured artists speak directly about the glass art community’s cooperative spirit—in Bellingham, Washington, for instance, Ed Schmid of Glass Mountain Studios hand-wrote and illustrated two hefty manuals on how to blow glass in the 1980s, because no other instructive literature was available to him and others at the time.
Filmed with a handheld camera over three years, it’s clear that, despite a shaky structure and somewhat haphazard editing, “My Glass Odyssey” is a labor of love. See the trailer on the film’s website. for more information.
On August 2nd, the film will be shown at the Sandwich Glass Museum in Sandwich, Massachusetts at 5:30 pm. For more information, please see the official event Web page.
—Isabella Webbe