This video will tell you all about the cold glass process I use to make my work. I hope you enjoy it and please share if you do! Website: http://www.jackstorms.com Both a tremendous athlete and a motivated student growing up in New Hampshire, it wasn’t until later in life that Jack discovered his passions in contemporary art and graduated at age 30 from Plymouth State University with a BA in Art focusing primarily on studio production. It was during his junior year there that he happened upon what would eventually become an entryway to his legacy, the studio of a glass artist that was close to his school where he was producing a phenomenally rare style of glass art work combining lead crystal and dichroic glass using a cold-glass process. The process itself which required several weeks to produce even one completed glass sculpture was incredibly intense and physically challenging, and the number of glass artisans working in this form of fine art could be counted on one hand. Working side by side with the artisan for over a year, Jack learned every component and facet of this incredibly challenging and rare art form and eventually was a strong enough sculptor to branch out on his own in 2004 and open Storm Works Studios.
Both challenged and inspired by having been told that his vision was impossible, one of Jack’s first major accomplishments as an independent glass artist was to invent and design a cold-working lathe that offers him the ability to turn glass and sculpt shapes with curves and details like one would produce from a wooden medium. Early memories of studying his father’s craftsmanship as he worked for hours in his own studio with a wooden lathe provided him with the blueprint of his vision, and his intense drive and deeply embedded passion as a glass artist combined with the inspiration that came from the idea of pioneering new trails in the world of fine art motivated him toward this remarkable accomplishment.
The intense cold-glass process which can take up to 24 weeks for each contemporary glass sculpture to come to life begins at the heart of the design, by creating a core of lead crystal which is cut, polished and laminated creating reflective mirrors. When wrapped in optical glass, the refraction of light as it passes through the glass creates rainbows of hypnotic color. The drawn out process of repetitive cutting, grinding and polishing requires intense passion, rigid self discipline, and more blood sweat and tears than any artisan could wrap their mind around. The results, are mind boggling works of contemporary glass art.
Drawing inspiration from both his heart and his mind when conceiving his artistic designs, at the heart of each lead crystal sculpture by Jack Storms lays the theory of Fibonacci, a great mathematician that articulated the natural math seen in nature. Natural beauty is created, not manufactured. From the repetition florets of a flower to the scales of a pineapple’s skin, Fibonacci numbers are found in the pattern of growth of every living thing in nature.
In spite of the intense natural talent born to Jack’s very talented hands, it was only a couple of years after the opening of Storm Works Studios that Jack found himself desperately seeking some amazing source of inspiration to keep him producing his incredibly beautiful and artistically brilliant glass sculptures. It was in true fairytale love story form that the serendipitous hand of fate brought him a beautiful princess that would rescue him from himself. True love brought Jack to his wife Vivian, and Vivian brought Jack through his stormy weather helping him find his inspiration again, and jumping in feet first to completely support Jack’s dreams and everything that meant to StormWorks Studio’s allowing Jack’s glass studio to flourish. A match made in heaven, Jack and Vivian married and brought their son Owen into the world.
Jack’s complex heart and deeply rooted emotions make him an exemplary caretaker for his family, who are the driving force behind his creative inspiration. Only one muse inspired glass sculpture in Jack’s collection, the Viviovo sculpture beams with radiant light and colors from within having been modeled after the intense beauty and fire burning within his wife Vivian.
My name is Jack Storms.
I'm a cold glass sculptor in Los Angeles, California.
I've always been good at art.
From when I was a little kid, I always loved to draw and sculpt and create.
What made me want to become an artist is I was always good at it, and I fell in love
with the process.
So when I got my degree from college, I threw up my hat, and before I caught it, I was having
panic attacks about what I was going to do with this degree in art.
But I always knew that if you take art seriously, you can find a career in it.
The first thing I did is I started to look for a place that could use someone in their
professional art studio, and I was lucky enough to find a place that did optic sculpture.
So I got the job, and I started working there, and from the second I was there, I just knew
it was something I was going to do for the rest of my life.
What makes the artwork so unique is the fact that there are very few people on the planet
that undertake this endeavor to create this type of artwork.
Basically, 99.9% of the art glass that you see out there in the world is formed hot.
That is to say, they get their materials and they start manipulating the shape of the glass
and start playing around with the colors, and they do that hot.
So they administer flame to it, or they put it in a kiln, or, you know, there's several
methods.
But what I do is I don't use any heat at all.
I grind and grind and grind, and then I polish, and that's what separates me from everybody
else.
It's much more difficult, and it takes a lot more time, but for me, the effects are just
brilliant.
Each one of these pieces takes approximately 8 to 18 weeks to complete from start to finish.
Because of the labor involved and because of the perfection, because of the tolerances
being so tight, it's a pursuit of perfection at every single turn.
So because of that, they take some time.
Let me describe the process for you.
We get these large blocks of glass.
This one is a piece of gold lead crystal, and it comes in a block about that long, and
then we cut it into different pieces, and then I'll grind down all these pieces flat.
So that's what I do with every single piece of lead crystal that comes in here.
So from this point, I'll cut this down the middle, polish all those interior surfaces.
That takes about a day and a half.
Then I insert a piece of dichroic.
For example, this piece is halfway in process.
So what I've done is I've put in the dichroic right here, all that color, and then I come
to a stage like this where I have them where you see color all the way around here.
That's because I've cut it so many times and put all this color in.
So this is a week-long, two-week-long process because what you've got to do is you've got
to get it to a point where it's completely polished, bring it back to a glue room, administer
all the color that's in there, put it back together, bring it back out, recut it, bring
it back to the glue room, bring it back out, regrind it, recut it, bring it back to the
glue room.
So every single one of these steps, they just take time, time, time.
There's not a whole lot you can do for shortcuts if you want the work to look like it should
look.
Almost universally, people ask me when they see the work, how did you get that in there?
How did you get those pieces in there?
How did you get that color in there?
And I've got to explain to them that actually I build that first and then I surround it
with clear glass.
It relies on what's called a refractive index.
So the inside is lead crystal and light passes through that differently than it does with
the optic crystal that I surround the work with.
So the optic crystal and the high-end epoxy that I use that holds it all together again,
they share the same refractive index, so light passes through them without much acknowledgment
to the eye.
But when it comes to the lead, you'll see a fine line of demarcation where you just
see this piece of a glass within glass almost suspended.
Of course it's not, but it appears that way.
It's a fun, beautiful aspect of the work.
So one of the components that I use inside all the artwork is the dichroic crystal.
What makes a dichroic crystal so spectacular is that it shows two different colors for
every piece of glass you have.
Now you can probably see that it's wafer thin, but within this thin piece of glass there's
a coating on here that will translate into two different colors.
It'll also cast a colored shadow, and it will reflect color as well.
It's just one of the elements that add to the spectacular nature of the work.
My favorite piece of artwork is by far the Viviovo.
I created this piece of artwork, I started it, and it just proved to be so difficult
in the process that I pretty much gave up on it.
And I was getting ready for a show, and I had met this wonderful girl that eventually
ended up being my wife, and I was trying to show off for her.
So I brought her in front of the 12, 15, 20 pieces that I had getting ready for a show.
And I said, what's your favorite piece?
Thinking that I was going to, I don't know what I was going to do.
Maybe I was going to give it to her, I don't know.
And she looks at all the pieces and she says, I love them all, but this one that's unfinished
right here, I think that's my favorite because of what it could be.
It looks like it's almost there.
And of course, I named that piece after her, it was the Viviovo.
Vivian is my wife's name, and ovo is Portuguese for egg, and my wife's from Brazil, so it
all came together because my fantastic idea was to name the thing egg.
This is a gold Viviovo, or Viviovo de Oro, and this is just a phenomenal piece.
I do this for a living.
I stare at the work all day, and every single time I do one of these pieces, it makes me
pause and sit there and just reflect on how beautiful it is.
I sometimes look at this and I can't believe I do this kind of work.
It blows me away.
One of the things about my work that I find so exciting is that I incorporate a Fibonacci
sequence and Fibonacci ratios into the work.
The Fibonacci ratio is the golden ratio.
It's everywhere in nature.
It's why a tree grows so tall versus so wide.
It's everywhere in our body.
Its ratios are in our face, your nose is in a ratio to your eye, and you see it almost
universally in a conch shell.
That spiral comes up.
That's a ratio.
The reason why I use that in my artwork is because all good artwork has it, but it's
crucial to my work because I rely on a straight line.
All of my polishing surfaces have to be straight, and there's no such thing as a straight line
in nature.
So what I've got to do is I've got to take the straight lines that don't occur in nature
and make them natural.
So I've got to use that Fibonacci as a bridge between the collector and the artwork because
without it, it looks very manufactured and it looks very automated, and it's not.
It's labor intensive at every step of the process.
It's intense human interaction, and it's pursuit of perfection.
So to get that across, to get it across that it's a creation and not something that's being
manufactured, then the Fibonacci is absolutely crucial.
I draw inspiration from being able to pull ideas out of the ether, being able to touch
the creative, being able to draw from that creative wellspring, being able to take something
from your head, your thoughts, and being able to translate them into something that's
solid right in front of you.
A lot of people ask me what my artwork means to me.
What does this piece mean to me?
But that's not the right question.
My question is what is this artwork going to mean to the person that's going to take
it home?
Because that's what, to me, this artwork is really all about.
What does it mean to the person that is going to put this in their home and look at it every
day?
That's where I get my meaning from.
So when someone says, Jack, what does the artwork mean to you?
I turn it around on them and I say, you've got to tell me what it means to you.
Is this something that you bought for your wife for an anniversary gift, or is this something
to remember your trip to Hawaii, or is it something that you just want to buy to look
at every day because it's just so beautiful?
Because if that's the answer, because it looks so beautiful, then the answer is I created
it out of sheer beauty.
