Preserving the arts is so many areas is an ongoing struggle as America wades deeper into a 21st century featuring new generations with fresh outlooks and new financial challenges.
But it is being done, and vital artistic traditions are being kept alive so that they are enjoyed — and carried on — by future generations.
One of these is the art of handblown glass — once of a kind pieces that you see in galleries, fine stores and special arts and crafts shows. Literally the product of sweat, creativity, and an idea in a glassblower’s mind.
I’ve gotten emails over the past year from people who noticed and like the ad in the upper right for glass and have asked and I reply: yes, Roger Gandelman is my brother. And he has literally dedicated his life to designing and producing one-of-a-kind art glass. In answer to these many inquires and to further note how this ancient artistic tradition is being carried on, here’s part of an article appearing on www.contact.com the Connecticut Business News Journal’s website on Roger (photo from that article):
Glassblower Gandelman breathes new life into an ancient art
A chance visit to a small New Haven gallery in search of a wedding present for a friend led Roger Gandelman down a career path he had never imagined.
“I had no idea what to buy,” recalls Gandelman. “My mind was a blank.” While wandering around the galley looking for inspiration he spotted a display of vases. “I had never seen art glass before. The vases had magnificent flowers encased in the glass. I thought they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.”
His friend didn’t receive one of these objets d’art (Gandelman settled for more affordable goblets). But he couldn’t shake the picture in his head of those incredible vases. One week after his visit to the gallery, Gandelman enrolled in a night class in glassblowing at Southern Connecticut State University.
Gandelman admits that his early attempts were somewhat less than successful. “My flowers looked like flowers — ugly flowers,” Gandelman recounts. Determined to master the craft, he spent a year breathing life into his flowers, refining and expanding his technique. ”I had no real sense of aesthetics,” says Gandelman. “I just wanted to make flowers, to make them warm, lush and vibrant, the way I remembered flowers as a child.”
Although primarily self-taught, Gandelman apprenticed briefly for Rich Miller, a glass artist who had a studio at Bittersweet Farms in Branford. An accomplished musician, Gandelman made a deal with Miller. “Basically it was: I’ll teach you guitar if you teach me glass blowing,” Gandelman says.
In fact, it would have been logical for Gandelman to make his living as a musician. A guitar player and blues singer in the 1960s and early ‘70s, for one year in the latter part of his music career he was Carly Simon’s personal guitar instructor. And because his family owned a large printing firm, native New Havener Gandelman might have chosen that business as a permanent career. But art glass had captured his heart and soul.
In 1974 he opened a shop in Moodus, sharing space with another glassblower. Gandelman spent seven years there producing vases, paper weights and perfume bottles and refining his technique.
“I can’t remember exactly what it cost me to set up that first shop. I know it was less than $5,000. I didn’t make a lot of money but I lived in the country and frugally, to say the least, so it was manageable. And it was easier to make a living at glassblowing then because there were so few artists producing glass.”
“In the early days when I attended a wholesale show buyers purchased anything I made. I’d be competing with 20 or 30 glass artisans,” says Gandelman. “Now it’s more like 400 that show up for a large wholesale show.“
Gandelman, 58, has never had a retail shop. After moving around the New Haven area for several years he settled into a shop in Branford where he has been located for over two decades. “Once I left Moodus I decided to concentrate on producing perfume bottles,” he explains.
Creating perfume bottles is labor-intensive. Gandelman says he can produce about eight medium-sized bottles a day. He has one employee who only does cold work or what we might call polishing or finishing. The bottles themselves are pure Gandelman. And the payoff is, “The more work you put into the perfume bottles, the better they get,” says Gandelman.
There is a lot more so GO HERE to read the rest.
And HERE’S THE LINK to his website where he displays and sells the pieces he has produced with such care and love.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.