From the artist's hand at work to the admirer's eye in a glass studio

December 21, 2003|Diane E. Foulds, Globe Correspondent

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On the day we were there, we drank it all in and then traveled the 20 miles south on Interstate 91 to the main factory in Windsor. We perused the spacious shop and then headed for the glassblowing area. Being a weekday afternoon, we were alone but for a woman who had wandered in on the other side with a shopping bag over her arm. I couldn't help looking her way to see if she was as rapt as we were, and by all appearances, she was. It was pure performance art. The two glassblowers, a dexterous gaffer and his young assistant, were spinning a gigantic bowl out of what looked like rubber cement.

It must have been heavy, yet it looked weightless, like a glistening helium balloon. Moving deftly, they eased the bowl onto a pontil rod, shifting their bodies cautiously into every turn of the wrist with the measured grace of a lion tamer waving a chair. Their control seemed so effortless that we almost jumped when the piece suddenly crashed to the floor, shattering to smithereens.

We gasped. The woman with the shopping bag looked unimpressed and plodded toward the door. The glassblowers sat back and laughed, shrugging it all off. But we were nonplussed. It had been a duel, that much we understood. And that humans are fallible goes without saying. What we had not realized was the level of risk, and that's what made it all so memorable.

Diane E. Foulds is a freelance writer who lives in Burlington, Vt.