Hot glass

OSAGE — Ed Pennebaker doesn’t have time to get distracted.

When Pennebaker pulls the superheated glass out of his glass furnace, it’s a shade over 2,100 degrees. He has about a minute and a half - two minutes, tops - to blow it, bend it and shape it and then it’s too late.

“It won’t crack until it gets down to like 1,000 degrees, but when you’re stretching it out and wrapping it around something that’s kinda cold, like a pipe, it’s getting pretty thin, and that will crack it [faster],” he says. “You’re stretching and forming it at the same time.”

Pennebaker explains this patiently, repeatedly, doing all he can to ensure that the concept is fully comprehended. It doesn’t make his work as a glassmaker any less astounding, but he manages to make it seem rather understandable.

He teaches a small, week-long class once a year at his Osage studio, working with everyone from beginners to experienced glassmakers, and displays the same trademark easygoing, but focused style he does for visiting media members on a snowy winter morning.

“Ed is a wonderful teacher,” says Lyla Allison, who teaches metal smithing at Eureka Springs School of the Arts (ESSA), and has twice been in Pennebaker’s classes. “He really allowed students to take it where we wanted to go. He didn’t say no to anybody; he was fostering creativity in all of us.”

Pennebaker has taught classes through ESSA and the Arkansas Craft School, which is based in Mountain View. He enjoys the classes, and has even allowed students to camp on his property, tucked away in rural Carroll County.

But what Pennebaker really loves is the creativity his work as a glassmaker allows him, as well as the intense focus that goes into making his lighting pieces and elaborate, one-of-a-kind chandeliers.

The work he makes through his company, Red Fern Glass, is available in more than a dozen galleries around the country, from California to Florida. Those galleries include several in Arkansas, among them the Butler Center Galleries in Little Rock.

“His work is very ornate, and really varied,” says Colin Thompson, an art administrator for the Central Arkansas Library System, which administers the Butler Center Galleries. “There’s a lot of action going on. Visually, it’s very exciting.”

LEARNING HIS CRAFT

Growing up in Garden City, in the southwest corner of Kansas, Pennebaker was a creative kid.

He loved art, and studied it at Emporia (Kansas) State University. His artistic interests didn’t include glass, though. He didn’t bother taking part in Emporia’s glass program.

“I hadn’t really heard anything about glass” as a kid, the 57-year-old Pennebaker says. “I figured I’d probably be an illustrator or graphic designer, doing something like advertising art.”

Pennebaker wasn’t introduced to glass until after college, when he was an artist-in-residence in Liberal, Kan. There, in 1981, he met Chuck Watson, a high school art teacher who had a glass studio.

Pennebaker began working with Watson on weekends and “whenever he fired his studio up,” and he immediately took to the new medium.

To really get good at making glass, it takes “a couple years,” Pennebaker says, so it wasn’t until 1985 that he struck out on his own in Arkansas. In the meantime, he learned the craft under Watson for two years, and then spent two years as a glassworks assistant at Hale Farm and Village in Bath, Ohio, between Akron and Cleveland.

He had been introduced to Hale Farm - a place he describes as “kinda like Silver Dollar City” in Branson - when he had taken a motorcycle trip with his parents the summer after his artist in-residence program ended. The trip included a stop at Hale Farm, which was demonstrating glass as a craft. Pennebaker asked about a job, and when there was an opening a few months later, he was hired.

In all, Pennebaker spent four years studying glassmaking techniques, starting with the basics and gradually increasing in complexity.

At Hale Farm, Pennebaker specialized in early 19th-century glass replicas. Although these days he focuses primarily on chandeliers and light fixtures, copies of objects from the early 19th century are still some of his favorite things to make - flasks, candy jars and globular (round) bottles.

The antique display case in the back half of Pennebaker’s studio is filled with replicas of pieces made in the early 1800s. Among them are elaborate scent bottles, which resemble spiked seahorses.

The scent bottles take just 15 minutes to make, he says, but are the most complex thing he makes because of their intricacy.

“Ed, to me, is the most talented glass blower in the state,” says Mac Murphy, the owner of the M2 Gallery in Little Rock, which stocks Pennebaker’s work. “His work has a real kind of light sophistication about it. It seems to be almost floating.”

GETTING IT RIGHT

Pennebaker’s home is so remote, requiring drives on two different unpaved roads, that he can’t get supplies delivered there.

The raw material he uses to make glass is called Spruce Pine batch, which gets its name from the place where it is sold: Spruce Pine, N.C. The batch comes in 50-pound bags, of which Pennebaker will buy several dozen in a single order.

“I usually buy 2,000 pounds at a time,” he says. “It comes on an 18-wheeler truck, and I have to go down to Osage and transfer it to a trailer to bring it up.”

When Pennebaker moved to his current property 22 years ago, he made his own glass formula, buying the raw materials and mixing it up himself. These days, he prefers the Spruce Pine batch.

The batch is a silica-soda ash and lime mixture, and looks like white pellets. When he’s preparing to make glass, Ed will shovel between 5 and 10 pounds of the batch into the glass furnace at a time.

The natural gas-fired furnace is about 2,100 degrees. Pennebaker will wait for the batch to melt, and then add more batch, until he has put 100 pounds of it into the furnace. Along with that, he’ll add 40 pounds of his own cullet (glass scraps), which helps melt the batch more quickly.

That’s 140 pounds of raw materials in the furnace, which yields around 115-120 pounds of glass.

“In the batch, you’ve got moisture and sodium carbonate and things that [evaporate] out of the bag as it melts,” he says.

Glass making is a study in working quickly and extreme patience. It takes Pennebaker an entire day to get all the materials into the furnace and melted.

And he’s working with a single color a week. If Pennebaker wants to make his glass a certain color, he has two ways of doing it:

He can add the minerals himself into the mixture before he melts it in the furnace, things like cobalt or iron, copper or nickel.

He can buy cullet, glass factory scrap, and remelt it. He does this for red and amber glass.

He can’t switch colors until all the batch in the furnace is used up.

“I do that with some colors because like this red,” he says, gesturing to a piece of red glass in his back room, “is difficult to make. It has cadmium and selenium in it, which are real toxic, and I don’t want to deal with those chemicals.”

MOVING QUICKLY

Even the process of heating up Pennebaker’s studio requires patience.

After having the glass furnace off for more than a month, Pennebaker fired it up in early January. Getting it to 2,100 or so degrees took more than three days.

“You could come up faster, but you don’t want to crack some of the lining in it and the crucible that holds the glass,” he says. “You want to come up slow so they don’t crack.”

He got to work in early January, and the furnace will be on until at least the middle of June. He spends around four days a week making glass, and the other days are for doing office work or visiting his girlfriend. (Pennebaker serves as his own agent and accountant, and is responsible for updating the website, redfernglass.com, which his stepson originally designed.)

These days, his work primarily centers around his chandeliers. Pennebaker first got interested in curly forms in the mid-1990s.

Up until that point, he had been making primarily functional pieces, like vases and bowls. He doesn’t make “the functional stuff ” anymore, but when he teaches his classes today, those sort of things are popular among his students - nobody goes from beginner to chandelier-maker in a week, after all - so he’s happy to help them do it.

“In my first class, I ended up coming out with nine finished pieces,” Allison said. “I had paperweights and blown vessels, and they weren’t all solid; he taught us how to make ornaments and wine glasses and little tumblers.”

For a few years after Pennebaker began experimenting with curly forms, they were merely sculptural pieces, which he called “clusters.”

These clusters are hallmarks of his chandeliers today. A single chandelier may have dozens of curly pieces in it, which must be made one at a time.

“His use of color and the lyrical quality of it” is what stands out in the chandeliers, Thompson says. “Just the movement of the glass itself, the way he turns it upside down and uses a lot of curly rods … they’ve got a lot of variety.”

To make these clusters, Pennebaker takes the glass straight from the furnace and puts it into an optic mold on the floor. The mold is gear shaped, and puts a texture on the glass.

The texture holds as he puts the glass on a rod and begins to spin it. This lengthens the glass, by using gravity.

In between spins, he blows into the end of the rod. This starts a bubble in the glass, which makes it hollow.

Next he puts it in a second oven, which he calls a “glory hole.” This oven is around 2,200 degrees, a little hotter than the furnace, which quickly reheats the glass. This step is necessary to continue shaping the glass.

After removing it from the “glory hole,” Pennebaker spins the glass even longer. Sometimes he clips a piece off the tip, then adds a tiny piece of glass on top, which he curves around so it forms a hook, while other times he does not clip the end after the additional spins.

Regardless, the next step is to place the glass in an annealing oven. There, it spends two hours at 1,000 degrees before the oven is shut off, allowing the glass to cool overnight.

All this activity - from the furnace to the annealing oven - takes place in just a few minutes.

“The way you work with glass, it’s like you can’t think about anything else,” says Pennebaker, who works alone, save for his dog, Calvin. “It’s a real focused activity. That’s one thing I like about it.”