On a cold, wet Saturday in Emporia, fire bloomed around Randy Walker.
The artist stood in the midst of the Emporia State University art annex. In one corner, flames licked from a small flat furnace holding metal rods. Nearby, heat radiated from a "glory hole," a big metal drum whose insides were an incandescent 2300 degrees Fahrenheit. Behind Walker, oxygen torches shot little jets and streams of flame, like a garden hose that suddenly produced fire instead of water.
Even though one wall of the annex was open to the elements, some people in the audience had already taken off their coats. Glassblowers were at work here. And a glassblower's paradise always has plenty of fire.
That's how the magic happens.
"To most people, glass is hard and it's cold and it's stiff and it's sharp," said Walker, a visiting artist from Bellingham, Wash who has blown glass for more than 20 years.. "But in that space, it's hot and it's fluid and it's soft -- just the opposite of how most people imagine it."
Walker, who spent most of last week working with ESU art students, was the center of gravity at Saturday's "Glass Guild Blowout," the annual show-off event for the university's glassblowers. A waiting crowd -- and it's rarely a small one -- watches as the artists heat and shape the glass carefully, even delicately.
The first lesson? Objects rarely resemble their final form right away. Early in the process, the molten glass at the end of Walker's rod looked like a reddish light bulb, which another student was "basting" with darker glass. But with careful rips and trims and several bakings, the bulb steadily transformed into a large glass leaf, with the "basted" lines becoming its veins. It had become alive, even colorful.
Which brings up the second lesson. At hotter-than-hot temperatures, you can't tell color in glass. Everything is brilliant orange before becoming a darker red or black. To get the colors you want takes memory, experience and an expert's knowledge of what the chemicals can do.
"A lot of times, when you're working with glass, you're working blind," Walker said.
As it happens, Walker specializes in colorful effects. That's only fair, since he started out when he was 17 by working with stained glass. It wasn't until after he got out of college that he saw what hot glass could do, at a city-sponsored glassblowing program.
"I didn't know anything about it," Walker said. "I didn't know it existed."
But as he watched someone make a small, four-inch glass plate, he was hooked. Cold glass was forgotten as he went into the fire.
Like any art, glassblowing comes from within. But also like any art, the tools to express that inner vision take time to acquire. Walker estimated that it takes about five to 10 years to learn the practical techniques you need to create the art you want.
Even then, you're still not done. Now it's time to get some friends together. Lesson three -- this is not a solo hobby.
"It takes a group of people and a lot of equipment," Walker said. "It's not something you can do in your garage on the weekends."
That collaboration was clear as Walker and the students formed a leaf, a branch for it (complete with wood graining) and a fruit. At times, it looked like a surgical team at work, with members passing pliers, or standing by with the torches, or taking the rod and its half-shaped glass back to the "glory hole."
The team was quick, fluid, responsive. A lot like the materials they were working, actually.
"I am amazed at how much they already knew," Walker said of the students. "When I offered a new technique, a new idea, they were ready to do it. ... I'm pretty astonished at the talent and enthusiasm that's here."