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When Richard Remsen was 10, his Navy father brought the family back home to Maine and settled in Camden where Remsen’s childhood was filled with swimming and snorkeling, boats, marine life, tinkering with antique cars, and “hanging out downtown just like kids do today.” He had no idea that dancing around with molten glass and 2,000° F furnaces would be his life.
Remsen is a sculptor specializing in blown and cast glass, as well as bronze and steel, often mating the two seemingly disparate elements—glass and metal—together. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), he has studied with the best of them, including studio glass pioneers Dale Chihuly and Dominic Labino.
Within days of his commencement at RISD, Remsen headed home to midcoast Maine looking for a place to work and live. He found it in the then-needy, abandoned West Rockport grange and former blueberry processing facility he now calls home. Open to the public, his showroom is narrow and deep, with sunlight and small spotlights illuminating the brilliant flaming shades of yellows, crimsons, cobalt blues of blown glass vessels, large-eyed fish, two-foot-long glass lures with wild metal fins. The door to the right leads to Remsen’s office; the door to the left opens into the cavernous, cement-floor hot shop where music blares, all manner of materials lurk, and furnaces often run 24/7.
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The 2008 Farnsworth exhibit A Gathering of Contemporary Glass: Artists from Haystack and Pilchuck, two of the country’s foremost glassmaking centers, featured the work of nationally recognized glassblowers from all over the country, including Remsen’s large-scale installation Glass Claws: Pulse Points. Farnsworth director Lora Urbanelli describes his work as “glass and metal sculptures that embody a sense of mystery, elegance, fantasy, and humor.”
Although marine castings for boatyards—keels, gutcheons, hinges, pintels, oarlocks, motor mounts—have been Remsen’s bread and butter for over 30 years, he prefers the larger sculptural work of glass and metal. This world with its strange vocabulary—blowpipe, chill mark, marver, gaffer, punty—marks an art that is thousands of years old; it has, however, only in the last 50 years been practiced in individual studios by solitary glassblowers. Remsen works in what is called soda-lime glass—silica sand, soda ash, and lime—with a few tools, a lot of heat, extreme agility, and his own breath traveling through the blowpipe into the heart of each piece.
What attracted you to glass?
It may be the ADHD part of my personality that liked the idea that you’ve got music blaring, you’ve got bright colors in the furnace, and you’ve got the glass dripping. You’ve got 17 irons in the fire. And I could still pursue that antique-car guy-skills thing I loved. I could take furnaces apart, pull blowers down, repair bearings.
That’s important as a glassblower?
There’re two kinds of glassblowers. There are those who just blow glass, and then there are those who build our own equipment and our own molds. We’re often prototyping new designs that might be a mix of metal molds and ceramic molds.
You’re clearly not in the “just a glassblower” category. You play with the equipment. Anything else you’re playing with right now?
There are things that you can cast, forge, fabricate some way in metal that create a real delicateness but a certain strength. I’m just starting to experiment with applying a glass coating to the metal so that it would allow me to create a shape that when I heat it in the furnace it won’t really change shape.
How would you describe glassblowing to the average person?
It’s a lot like wrestling. You’re reacting very quickly. So you have to think several moves ahead and you’re sort of competing with gravity and trying to work things out with centrifugal force.
You’ve spent most of your life by the ocean. Has that influenced your work?
Absolutely. I used to swim competitively and I think that water flowing over your body and your trying to go as fast as you can and knowing where you pull in the water so you can be as efficient and create the most force without dragging is all connected to how I am in the glass. There’s a flowing process, whether it’s metaphorical and literal. You’re always trying to reduce the amount of turbulence.
There’s a lot to think of here.
That’s why it’s important that you gather it all up and then forget about it and try to react intuitively. It’s like sailing. You’re on this boat, you’ve got it all rigged up, you’ve got control of the sails, but you’re putting yourself in an environment that, even though you try to control it the best you can, it’s throwing you any which way. Glassblowing’s like that. You try to gain as much control as you can, but you’re in an environment that is constantly pushing you out of control.
Have you lost a lot of pieces along the way?
Oh sure. It’s like fishing. You know there’s always one that gets away.
A lot of your work combines metal with glass. Why?
For me, it’s the idea that’s important. So, for example, with the lures, there are so many things in society that are alluring. Lures are everywhere—beautiful women, fast cars, new boats . . . And for me, all materials have a masculine, a feminine, or a neuter connotation. If you made, for instance, a glass hook, it doesn’t have the same feeling. It doesn’t elicit that cruel and vicious quality that a metal hook does.
How do you title your works?
Well, for this year’s Farnsworth installation, my wife and I were going out to dinner and she was putting on perfume. I asked her why she was putting it on those spots. She called them pulse points. It was an immediate reaction: Lobster is the pulse point of Maine. But see those pieces [a series of intense cobalt blue shapes]? The fellow who bought them calls them jellyfish. I figure if he’s going to buy three of them, he can call them anything he wants. [They will be installed in a residence under a glass floor with lights shining up through the strands of glass.]
Those blues are amazing. Do different colors react differently to heat?
Yeah, they do. Different colors absorb and dissipate heat at different rates. Metals give glass the colors. Cadmiums give yellows. Coal gives pinks, reds. Chrome gives it greens. Copper some greens and reds.
Music was blaring when we walked into the shop. Is it always?
If I’m working in glass it is. Like it? That’s Girl Nobody, a techno band I recently discovered. The background mood is all part of it, and music needs to rise above the noise of it all. With metal you’re cutting and fitting, tacking together; there’s a sequence that is more methodical. With glass it’s spontaneous. It’s a dance. Dancers think in movement, in musical notes, so music and dance are an integral part of blowing glass.
Timing must be very important.
There’s a general clock running—like the riff in a piece of music—and a stopwatch goes—well, not literally—and you’ve got a certain gap between when you left off and when you need to be in that timeline again. With the musician, somewhere in the back he’s listening to that timeline so he can come back and reenter at just the right time so it’s flawless and amazing. In glass there are several clocks and stopwatches going off at the same time.
So you’re being both controlled and spontaneous.
What a perfect life, eh?
