Bob Banford

Bob Banford discusses small studio glass makers in South Jersey before the studio glass movement. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:35.

Bob Banford: Down in South Jersey, there had been glassblowers working individually in their own small studios making glass since probably, oh, the late, the late thirties, they started with this. There was [August] Hofbauer and [Emil] Larson who used to, and the guys still worked in the different—Durand [Art] Glass and, and different ones, that worked in those factories started on their own after Durand had gone bankrupt through the depression as well, which is the biggest reason they went bankrupt.

Bob Banford discusses the Paperweight Collectors Weekend and its history and making paperweights with his father, Ray. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:47.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Bob Banford discusses his history with the Paperweight Collectors Weekends. Clip length: 01:09.

Bob Banford: This was well into my career actually. I started in glass with paperweights in 1973. I don’t remember—but the first convention, well, we had a Paperweight Collectors Association, and they had biannual conventions on the odd years, and then later on Wheaton Village started having their paperweight symposiums on the opposite year from the Paperweight Collectors Association. I’m not exactly sure when the Wheaton Village one started, but I would guess it was in the late seventies. And it was basically to give American artists some recognition because the Paperweight Collectors Association run by Paul Jokelson was more involved in promoting the French paperweights that he was the exclusive distributor to the United States for Baccarat and Saint-Louis. So he was actually, he started the thing to help push his products that he was importing. 

Time stamp: 01:13
Clip 2: Bob Banford discusses getting together with fellow paperweight makers at the Paperweight Collectors Weekends. Clip length: 00:28.

Bob Banford: Well, it was always good to get together. You know, we didn’t get together with many of our fellow artists. These were the only opportunities at these conventions, and it was good to see a grouping of your fellow paperweight artists. I was involved. I was one of the early people—started back in the seventies. So the group grew quite a bit.

Time stamp: 01:43
Clip 3: Bob Banford describes how he and his father began making paperweights. Clip length: 01:07.

Bob Banford: Well, my father [Ray Banford] was actually involved with buying and selling glass and paperweights and bought glass and paperweights from some of the contemporaries at the time around the South Jersey area. And we decided that we were going to try and make our own. So for graduation present from high school, he bought me the very first torch that both he and I started learning by trial and error how to make paperweights. There was no classes, no, most everything was a secret from the artists. They wouldn’t tell you anything. So you learn more or less by trial and error and looking at other people’s work and trying to figure out how they did different techniques. And also we studied the antique French paperweights that were made in the 1840s and 1850s. And that’s what I based my work off of. I love the techniques and their use of color and things like that. So my work always had a strong influence from the antique French paperweights.

Time stamp: 02:53
Clip 4: Bob Banford discusses the appeal of paperweights to him. Clip length: 00:54.

Bob Banford: Well, it’s just so fascinating and it’s a little world inside of a dome if you really look at it and just trying to create the things that went inside. The glass paperweights were always, they epitomize the finest things back in the antique French factories was the best glass, the best colors, and the best craftsmen and the best people to do the cold work, the grinding and polish after, they were the epitome of all the best departments put together in from the glass, from the French glass factories into a final product, and it was just fascinating that, you know, all this talent was rolled into one piece. It was later that the Americans started doing it and we did it more or less on our own instead of a factory setting. So that made us more artists than production craftsmen. 

Paul Hollister converses with Bob Banford about his and his father Ray Banford’s work at a 1977 paperweight exhibition at Habatat Gallery. Paul Hollister Recording, October 12, 1977. (Rakow title: Habatat Galleries fall show interviews [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168383). Clip length: 01:55. [note: October 12 date stated by Paul Hollister at beginning of recording]

Paul Hollister (PH): You’ve got, what? How many of you got all together?

Bob Banford (BB):  Of mine? 

PH: This is Bob Banford. Yeah, of yours and your father’s [Ray Banford’s] got about six or eight—11. Gee, you’ve come quite a long way since the last things I see you’re doing—

BB: These are all my dad’s here on this side and mine over on the other side here—

PH: I see.

BB: —Distinguishable by the red, white and blue initial cane inside. 

Geraldine Casper (GC): Well, you do that too. [music playing in the background] I’ve noticed several of them will have their little—

BB: Yeah, we put our initial inside. 

GC: Yes. Yes. 

BB: So they can be identified. 

[indistinguishable voices respond in background]

BB: The new design here, the snake with the tree stump, and another thing we’re working on—

PH: Yes, this is a—

GC: That one attracts me—

PH:  —sort of a piece of driftwood on a, on a yellow pebble ground where the snake—with at least three coils and the head turned around and your signature cane and the vase done in the Egyptian fifth, sixth century BC style where the combing is that actually combed—

BB: Yeah, it’s combed on the outside—

PH: With the vase of flowers? 

BB: Yes. And on the base itself , you have to really look at it, but there is a gold butterfly on the base. It’s kind of hard to see in the case—the angle. 

PH: This is on a pale, blue ground with three Baccarat-like tiny, but very beautiful flowers in a vase that is combed in Egyptian style and there you’ve got to “B” on your old—

BB: Yeah. 

PH: —that’s the old style model “B,” last year year’s “B”.