Atlantic Art Glass
“I am a professional glassblower and I have been since 1991 so asking what originally inspired me to do it is sort of a mining the depths of memory now that it's almost 30 years ago. But I've always been a creative person, and I spent the better part of my youth trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life basically. And I tried furniture, making photography, cooking, baking, so many, you know, artistic pursuits. And all along the way I worked for small business people or even large corporations. At the same time that I was seeking my, you know, my, my bliss, if you will, I finally worked for a furniture maker who used glass very significantly in her creations. This is when I was living in San Francisco. I loved making furniture. I love the look of the glass, but I didn't like how long and how precise the process was, you know, so my search needed to continue. I needed to keep trying to figure out what I was going to do. After living in San Francisco, my husband and I, we moved to the Midwest, we moved to Illinois, because Ken was needing to finish his degree in school. And so we went to Carbondale, Illinois, where Southern Illinois University is and while I was there, they had this fantastic art department and they had this really tricked out glassblowing studio. So it was this real, you know, just right place, right time kind of moment. I was able to take some graduate level classes in the glass department. And it just was, you know, I feel like after many years of my 20s I found my medium, my material,” says Linda Perrin, founder and designer of Atlantic Art Glass.
Linda and her husband Ken are both fabulous creatives and they don’t focus on just one thing. They are skilled in a variety of areas including glass art. When both of them came to Maine, they didn’t know Ellsworth would be the home of their glass blowing studio until they drove past their dream space.
Photographed by Frances Mahoney
Linda and Ken Perrin share their love through art including their popular glass blown art pieces.
“We moved to Ellsworth in 2005 and that was approximately eight or so years after having this small studio on Mount Desert Island, in a cove right outside of Bar Harbor. And basically, we had incubated our, you know, our work, our designs in this small studio. And we were beginning to get more national recognition and larger accounts and more demand for our work. And we were renting that little studio so you know, every artist's dream is to move into a big space and have their, you know, have a big studio and maybe become some sort of community center or something like that. We just started looking, we looked all over Mount Desert Island, but of course it was really expensive. And a lot of the buildings were made of wood, they were stick built, which you know, when you have a glassblowing studio it is a little bit hard to get insurance, it is just basically dangerous. So we've ventured off of the island, which was really hard psychologically to do, because we had, I don't know, Desert Island can be a little insular and it's got a really, you know, close knit community. We, but we ventured off and we started looking, you know, from Deer Isle to Mount Desert Island, back and forth, we would go finally, one frustrated morning, we were having breakfast in downtown Ellsworth and we were really feeling like we just couldn't find what we needed. So we just, we left the restaurant and we just took a left turn instead of a right onto Main Street. We just took a left, which took us back a block off of Main Street. And as we were making our way back home, we drove by this great big brick building out front it said ‘for rent’ and there was a fella who was having a garage sale so I was like, that's the kind of building we need. But I had promised myself that we weren't going to rent another, we weren't going to rent anymore. We were ready. We're at that point in our life where we really wanted to put down roots and start building some equity. And so we came up and the fella said that, in fact, the people had been interested in selling. We got their name, you know, and we contacted them and we were able to negotiate. It took a little while being artists to convince a bank that we could, we should buy a big warehouse but we were able to negotiate buying the place. So the building is the first thing that brought us to Ellsworth and then we realized shortly thereafter how lucky we were to be in Ellsworth because we were in this center where we could continue to maintain our customer base from Mount Desert Island but now we were beginning to reach customers in Blue Hill, Bucksport, Bangor, Winter Harbor, we realized that we were really in the center of a lot of activity. And whereas maybe each one of those communities has their own individual identity and they don't go to each other. They all came to Ellsworth,” says Linda.
Linda’s glass blowing is quite a process as it’s fast yet there are many steps to it. It feels like you’re sailing a ship and to get the right wind to sail you need to tack and jibe, well with glass blowing there are many more steps to it and it gets hot!
“Glassblowing is about 3,000 years old and, believe it or not, some of those techniques and those traditions haven't changed much over those hundreds and hundreds of years. Basically, your furnace is a really fundamental piece of equipment if you're going to work the way I do. And the furnace is a place where you can create a temperature over 2,000 degrees and you can melt or actually cook up glass. And so glass is made from silica, and ash and lime, and it can have some other components to give it different characteristics. But to turn basically silica or stone into a molten material and, like I said, it takes a really high temperature, and it can take a long time so we have a furnace that is electric, which is a little unusual, but we like it because it's extremely safe and it's also really conservative on energy. It only gives the electric impulse, you know, as the glass, or as the temperature requires, as opposed to some people have gas furnaces. But if something goes wrong with a gas furnace, usually it's like an explosion. With an electric furnace, its usually that it shorts out and cools down. So you end up with you know, the opposite sort of consequence of a failure with an electric furnace. And so since we live in our building, we want it to be as safe as possible.
Back in the day, all the energy was open flame being with the fire being increased by different blowers and different techniques and stuff. But the electric furnace now has digital computer temperature controllers, that's where we get that sort of efficiency component, which is really nice to have. And that's newer, definitely a newer technology. So we take advantage of that. But the process of drying the glass out of the furnace on to a very simple steel pipe, and then blowing through the other end is something that, like I said, is pretty ancient, and pretty. Still nonetheless really amazing to do and watch and it's just really fun. So we draw the glass out of the furnace, I have a glassblowing bench where I sit and rotate the glass on the end of the bench using metal tools, metal and wood tools, to shape bubbles into vessels basically and it’s amazing the different shapes of vessels you can get out of bubbles. I mean, sure I'm, I'm a bubble blower but, um, so I use these really traditional techniques. But then of course, each person when introduced to some method, you know, no doubt there will be lots of ideas and so you can bring your own innovations and aesthetics,” says Linda.
Linda crafts everything from vessels to creatures to pumpkins and even sea glass inspired beads. She uses a special technique for the beads and has formed jewelry to showcase her beautiful work.
Photographed by Frances Mahoney
The glass is taking its form as a pumpkin as this tool puts divots into the glass to help make it look like a pumpkin shape.
Photographed by Frances Mahoney
The last piece to the process is to ensure that the shape has completely taken form and if it hasn’t a blow torch is used to take care of the details. Once it is good to go, the pumpkin glass is placed in a heated storage locker so the shape can settle.
“When I first started blowing glass, I was really interested in it being a personal adornment. And I began to understood that beads, glass beads were being made all over the planet, and that they were all being made in a similar fashion, but with lots of different aesthetic sort of characteristics. So when I had my own glassblowing studio, I thought I wanted to, you know, I kind of wanted to put my hand to it and see what I could do. And so using some basic skills that I had learned in other studios, I asked a very simple question. I said, ‘What if I blow into the glass before I pull in and pull it long and skinny, like taffy?’ and I discovered that the bubble would stretch along with the color as I pulled the glass, and it would create this long tube, which is pretty much how other beads were being made by machines and by other studios and factories, but doing it by hand, I was able to really control the use of color, control the shape and the size and just create a different aesthetic,” says Linda.
Linda and Ken are well known for their non-profit Artsworth which brings the creative community together in Ellsworth and she and others teach how to craft various things.
“Artsworth is a community arts organization that has a very organic, unfolding from Atlantic Art Glass, which is my studio business. As my husband and I were being active in the Maine state art community, or, we were volunteering for organizations that advocate for creativity, and craft and art in the state, we were meeting lots of wonderful artists, the idea of bringing people together where they can share their experiences, share their knowledge, became a goal for us and many of our peers. And so because we're in this warehouse, we found that we were doing gatherings pretty regularly. Like in October, we have the Maine Craft Weekend coming up, and we'll talk more about that. But that's just such a classic, such a great moment, you know, seasonal, it's such a great time in the year to get together and share. We're all done with the summer and we're all ready to celebrate, get together and kind of demonstrate our work to each other. And so Artsworth, we found that we needed some sort of structure or business structure that could communicate that mission outside of our glass mission, which had already become pretty developed and focused on our own personal, you know, livelihood and creativity. So to be able to tell the public what we had coming up or what our offerings might be for the season, who would be coming to speak, what artists might be doing a workshop, Artsworth became a venue for that. It became the business structure where we could have a separate website, we could have a separate, you know, financial system. And yet, we could still invite people to the warehouse to share along next to some event that might be happening in the glassblowing studio. We wanted to bring our fellow artists together where they could share in the space,” says Linda.
Maine has helped Linda find other creatives and bring them together with her space in Ellsworth. It seems as though both Linda and Ken have found a great community that supports one another in their craft and they hope to continue this for the long run.
“I don't think I would have my own studio if I was not living in Maine. Like I said, I've lived in California, I studied in Italy, and all of these places are amazingly inspiring places to learn about your art or craft but Maine is the place to do it. There's a lot of room and space in your yearly cycles to really be able to concentrate on your work in the winter time. Then, in the boom season and the summer, there is this incredible appreciation, you can reach a, you know, a national audience, you can reach customers that are from all over the globe here in Maine. And then as I said, in the winter, you can go back into your studio and have a lot of quiet space and time to concentrate on your work and your innovation. So organically it's this great ebb and flow that Maine has that I think allows an artist to really have the space and time to do their work. And then also has this incredible appreciation for the integrity of the artists and the quality that it seems to guarantee from its creators. And just this, the traffic, you know, people come here, and so we can reach them, and they seem to appreciate us so I feel like Maine is just an amazing place to be an artist,” says Linda.