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The Trance of Creation
by Mark Lucas ’75, Jobson Professor of English
from an essay in Stephen Rolfe Powell: Glassmaker
On the days appointed for working hot, [Steve Powell ’74] depends on his crew to have the studio completely ready with no technical problems because he needs to have a clear head when he goes in to begin. He does not mind, however, that “people seem to congregate” in and around glass studios; he has learned how to focus on what he is doing and “tune distractions out.” With the first hot gather come the demands of centering the glass, and he is “immediately drawn into the process of making the work.” He is aware of the smells in the studio as melted beeswax lubricates the jacks and the molten glass makes contact with the fruitwood blocks. He begins to enter “the zone,” a feeling of connection with the glass. This feeling of synchrony, heightened sensation, and hyper-focus is hard to express, but it is like, Steve suggests, “when he is hitting good shots in tennis.”
As the successive gathers proceed, building up the clear glass that will be under the skin of color, the intensity in the room builds and “everyone on the crew becomes more focused.” Steve does his best work when he does not have to worry about any of the three or four crew members doing their jobs. They know that, he says, and take pride in making sure he is not distracted. (A favorite anecdote among the crew is about an episode when there was a screw-up and Steve went ballistic: “There’s a reason we do exactly the same thing every time,” he said, emphatically. “I don’t want to have to think!”)
The first critical point in the process is the color pick-up. If it goes awry, Steve has an expensive lump of lost time and miscarried vision on the end of his pipe. The large scale of his work and his nontraditional method make this moment “a constant challenge,” he says. The molten glass cylinder on the end of the hot steel pipe weighs some 30 pounds by now. Rolling this heavy cylinder in a straight line over the murrini is a delicate, easily-botched operation. Avoiding a ragged seam at the end of the pickup is even harder. Stationed at various angles around the table, crew members coach Steve’s moves to help guide a successful pick-up. Once this is accomplished, all feel a momentary relief.
As Steve and crew begin shaping and heating the piece to prepare for the final blow-out, the emotional intensity builds again. You can see it in Steve’s face as it contorts in concentration. At the bench he has a curious way of tilting his head and rocking back and forth as he sights down the rolling cylinder, which is fleshed now in a lizard skin of murrini. A crew member wipes Steve’s dripping forehead. Another follows his movements with a wooden paddle that shields his arm from the heat. He shows no awareness of either of them. Smoke rises up out of the wet newspaper Steve is using to work the malleable glass. Every twist and turn, every heating and cooling, now affect the ultimate form.
As he “takes the final heat,” he is “mesmerized,” he says, “by the piece turning in the glory hole.” Anticipation builds. Crew members speak of watching Steve “get through his emotions” as he stares into the glory hole. Staying focused is crucial. The heating must be perfect to achieve a long neck and full body in the piece. The timing now is mostly something he “feels in his body, through his hands.” As the glass is brought to life by the 2300º heat, it becomes “hyper responsive,” Steve says, highly reactive to every move “through gravity and the centrifugal force of turning the pipe.” As he feels the movement of the piece merge with his visualization of the shape, he knows “the time is right.”
He is most in the zone now as he “rips the piece out of the glory hole hoping that heat and gravity will pull the neck down enough, but not too much.” He passes the piece off to a crew member who in turn passes the pipe up to another who is waiting on top of the six-foot blow-out platform. He then grabs a blowtorch in one hand and an air gun in the other. This is the climactic birthing moment, very different from anything in the slower, more controlled Venetian method that is traditional. Steve describes his way as “everything at once with gravity and centrifugal force.” The go-for-broke momentum of it all has a drama and life that Steve loves. Right now, he says, “is like having the twenty years it might take to grow a tree happen in just a few moments before your eyes.” This is Steve’s last window to work the piece, and he is shouting, shifting, torching, cooling as if a life hangs in the balance. He feels as if he is “out of his mind,” yet he is making split-second decisions inside the twisting knot of assistants on and around the blow-out platform. The loud music in the studio is off now. Steve and crew are barking monosyllabic directions over the rumble of the furnace and the hiss of the torches. “Up!” “Down!” “Turn!” “Blow!” “Stop!” “Neck!” Although outsiders have described these moments as frenzied, Steve says they unfold for him in slow motion.
Once the piece’s shape is defined, Steve feels he begins thinking practically again. He and others begin evening up the heat with torches, getting ready to disconnect the piece and put it in the annealing oven. After the scorpion torch is brought out to melt the glass off the blowpipe, the pontil is all that engages the cooling piece. The glass at the bottom of the pontil is chilled and scored, then tapped off with an old hockey stick. The piece falls into the waiting arms of a team member in protection gear. Steve torches it as it goes into its nest in the oven.
Gradually he has felt himself coming back to normal consciousness. The return is a little reluctant. “Part of me,” he says, “wants to stay in that trance of creation.” He and the crew look at each other, knowing that they “have just gone through something together.” He shakes each crew member’s hand. The aura lingers awhile, yet “we all know we need to start getting ready for the next piece before the aura is gone.” This aura is his addiction.
Afterwards, Steve’s whole day feels different. He knows he “has done something he’s supposed
to do.”
Mark Lucas ’75 writes on southern literature and culture and plays with originals band BILLYBLUES when not teaching English at Centre. This excerpt is from the lead essay in Stephen Rolfe Powell: Glassmaker (copyrighted by the University Press of Kentucky, 2007, and used here with kind permission). The book is a retrospective of Steve Powell ’74’s remarkable career in glass. The two became friends on the Centre tennis team and have taught together at Centre for almost 25 years.
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