Mark Peiser

American artist Mark Peiser (1938– ) studied electrical engineering at Purdue University before earning his BS in design from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1961. Following an early career in industrial design, he studied piano and composition at DePaul University, beginning in 1965. In 1967, Peiser started studying glass at the Penland School of Craft. He became the school’s first resident craftsman in glass that same year and then settled at Penland, building his home and personal studio near the school. Peiser is one of the founders of the Glass Art Society and is known for his innovative exploration of the properties of glass, including formulating new base glasses and colors for his various series of works.

Works

Passage II, 2016. Hot cast phase separated glass, acid finished. H: 21.688 in, W: 27 in, D: 8.625 in. Image courtesy of Mark Peiser.

Pyramid from the Inner Space Series 288, 1985. Compound cast glass, cut and polished. H: 12 in, W: 10.25 in, D: 3.25 in. Image courtesy of Mark Peiser.

Lovers Leap, Paperweight Vase 253, 1980. Multilayered blown glass, torchworked imagery. H: 8.625 in, W: 5.062 in, D: 5.062 in. Image courtesy of Mark Peiser.

Media

Mark Peiser discusses how everyone in Penland’s first glass class was a beginner.

00:20 Transcript

Mark Peiser discusses how everyone in Penland’s first glass class was a beginner. Oral History Interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:20.

Mark Peiser: But the class itself, there were—of course, everybody else in that class were total beginners. The whole movement the whole—you know, the expertise of the—you know, at that time, it just wasn’t there.

Permalink

Mark Peiser talks about the importance of technique to him.

1:08 Transcript

Mark Peiser talks about the importance of technique to him. Oral history interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:08.

Mark Peiser: I think the mantra was to get glass out of the industrial environment and into the hands of private artisans I guess in their own studios, and to see if you could make art out of glass. And, I mean, that seemed to describe it, what they were about. And I admit I had a little problem with some of that. In that I liked going into the—I’m a hermit—‘into the private studio’ part, but the kind of the ‘making art’ part of it—you know, again, I get back into my piano experiences, you need to know some technique. You need to know something about working with the material. I mean, after that point, you know, most of what I’ve seen anyway was drop art. And it didn’t do much for me, and it didn’t seem like it was going to go anywhere unless they kind of learned—you know, unless we all learned some more.

Permalink

Mark Peiser discusses the meditative and performative aspects of glassmaking.

0:59 Transcript

Mark Peiser discusses the meditative and performative aspects of glassmaking. Oral history interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:59.

Mark Peiser: The blowing process, for me, was a meditative experience. And, and you know, and it was a zen kind of thing. And I really enjoyed doing that. It—I actually—kind of really transferred a lot of what I considered the performance aspects of music into the performance of blowing a piece of glass. And the—you know, there’s a right time for everything, and if you screw it up, you screwed it up. You know, it’s time to start over and so forth, you know. It’s in the record of the piece somewhere, it’s not—anyway. But I did—that’s what got me.

Permalink

Mark Peiser talks about working with students to demystify the process of formulating glass.

0:54

Mark Peiser talks about his pieces having animism.

1:58

Mark Peiser talks about his interest in flameworking and his suggestion that Paul Stankard come to Penland to give his workshop.

 

03:03 Transcript

Mark Peiser talks about his interest in flameworking and his suggestion that Paul Stankard come to Penland to give his workshop. Oral history interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:03.

Mark Peiser: Harvey Littleton had a show of glass at the Art Institute in Chicago [The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois] in—I forget when, sixty-five or something. I just happened to see him at the Art Institute in Chicago. In the same room was a display case with some work of a woman graduate student, I think, at the Art Institute who had done some flamework forms. And these—they were all little small things and I thought they were wonderful, I just was really intrigued by these little pieces. So that was before I even got into glass that was sort of in my mind. When I went out to CCAC [California College of the Arts, Oakland, California], to Marvin’s [Marvin Lipofsky’s] thing in the early seventies, a fellow came up to me and—wearing a suit, and said he had a flameworking business—did technical glassworking in Oakland, I guess or somewhere a little ways away, and was I interested or something like that. So I went over and saw it—I had no idea what that was about, and I was, again, just blown away, there were—there were like these racks of all different little condenser tubes and pipettes—I don’t know what they are, but all these different little glass forms and I thought, ‘Oh man, you could make such a ‘thing’ out all this stuff,’ you know? Just put it together. I went back, I talked to Marvin Lipofsky, you know, I said ‘Hey, I met this guy, I can’t remember his name.’ He says ‘Ah, yeah that guy, he keeps hanging around, you know?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, flamework and stuff, eh, blah blah blah.’ Anyways, somewhere along the way I met Paul Stankard and I was, again, just blown away by what he was doing and—boy, you know, and we talked and I—there was—that’s when I was doing the paperweight bases and people kinda drew a connection between the two, though—well, I guess maybe there is, sort of, but anyway, I was a big fan of his and I did, you know, ask him if he’d be interested in doing something at Penland [Penland School of Craft, Bakersville, North Carolina] and, you know, and he said, ‘No I don’t—,’ He—apparently he’d been given kind of a cold shoulder by the studio glass movement and, anway, I went to talk to whoever at Penland and, yeah, they went for it. And, yeah, was—he came down and, you know, and that was really happy he did, and, first of all, just to see how he did it. You know? And, anyway, yeah, that’s kind of how he got there.

Permalink

Mark Peiser discusses Paul Hollister’s deep understanding of his work.

0:47 Transcript

Mark Peiser discusses Paul Hollister’s deep understanding of his work. Oral history interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:48.

Mark Peiser: I think the thing that I most appreciated about Paul is that, you know, when I see people looking at my work, I kind of think I know what they’re seeing, you know? You can kind of read that. And when I saw him looking at the work, he saw so much more than most people did, you know? And he would say such things, and we would talk about them, and as a maker that was just enormously gratifying. You know, to talk to him, get his feedback, you know, he kind of—at least with me, he kind of seemed to be on the same wavelength and it was, yeah. It was special.

Permalink

Mark Peiser talks about the early studio movement, glass marbles, and teaching himself to blow glass.

1:08 Transcript

Mark Peiser talks about the early studio movement, glass marbles, and teaching himself to blow glass. Oral History Interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:08.

Mark Peiser: Well, you know, the studio movement started with the Johns-Manville 475 fiberglass [marbles] as the glass that they were using. I mean, it was—I’m sure it was done just because it was convenient and available. I didn’t need to know—again, I’m working by myself down in, you know, the mountains. But I didn’t need to know much about blowing glass. This is back—this stuff just—I had a big poster on the wall of some Swedish gob—beautiful stemware things, you know. I think [laughs]—you know, I’m trying to—of course, I didn’t know how to blow, really, but I just knew this stuff was not going to make that, you know. So I figured figuring out the glass was part of the job description. So well, through a number of initial experiences, I realized, ‘Hey, I can do this.’

Permalink

Mark Peiser discusses the creative environment of Penland.

00:37 Transcript

Mark Peiser discusses the creative environment of Penland. Oral History Interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:55.

Mark Peiser: Just the energy, you know, the aspiration of all the people that worked there in all the media, you know, was just infectious, you know. It was—it was—it was really something special. I mean I’ve been a few places, you know, where—you probably all have—where you get off the plane, say, ‘Wow, it’s different here.’ You can just feel it in the air. I mean, people would show up at Penland [Penland School of Craft, Penland, North Carolina] then and do that. It was just really, really special.

Permalink

Mark Peiser discusses becoming Penland’s first artist-in-residence.

01:37 Transcript

Mark Peiser discusses becoming Penland’s first artist-in-residence. Oral history interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:36.

Mark Peiser: The first day there, I discovered the sixties. I had basically been studying classical piano, I was in a different—I kind of lost track of popular culture, like, after high school. On the second day, which was like the first day of class, late at night the instructor named Roger Lang came back to the studio where I was, and said, ‘Wow, this is—’ he had never been there before, he was one of Harvey’s students, early students. He said, ‘Wow, this is quite a place. The director has just started a resident program where, in exchange for fixing anything on the campus’—Penland [Penland School of Craft, Penland, North Carolina] was a very humble, small budget place at that point—’in exchange for that, you could use the studio. Have access to the studio all through the winter.’ There were no winter classes. So I heard that the second day. The third day, I found the director, and said, ‘I want to apply.’ And he said, ‘Okay.’ And that was it, you know. I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ And it was supposedly a three-year residency. And that’s kind of how I got to it. I had no big dreams at all. Basically, I wanted to learn a trade and live in the woods. That was my goal at that point.

Permalink

Mark Peiser talks about the first glass class he took at Penland.

01:07 Transcript

Mark Peiser talks about the first glass class he took at Penland. Oral history interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:07.

Mark Peiser: In a three week class, I saw one demonstration that actually looked like it showed the promise of the process of glassblowing. And I must say, I was very impressed with that [clears throat]. And one of the things that impressed me was, well, this was just a simple bubble form, but treated right the proportions came out quite elegantly. But something that appealed to me was, in the blowing process anyway, if you blow the thing, basically you’re done. My experience in making stuff out of wood and metal, rubber, plastic—you know, all this stuff—the finishing is the huge—it’s where I start losing patience, let’s put it that way. And, you know, blowing glass—at least at that point—seemed like, ‘Wow. This is quick and easy, could be.’ And so that was very appealing about it.

Permalink

Mark Peiser talks about learning glass through trial and error at Penland.

1:59 Transcript

Mark Peiser talks about learning glass through trial and error at Penland. Oral History Interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:59.

Mark Peiser: No—there wasn’t anybody—there were no instructors at Penland. I mean, they’re basically, I showed up in the fall; I went back to Chicago after the summer thing. Went back to Chicago, closed down my business—such as it was—and got back. Got there in the fall, there’re like five people: the director, Bill Brown, his wife, and a guy who was sort of the maintenance, garbage man, and Bonnie Ford, who was sort of the—did the office, basically. You know, that’s all the people who were living on the whole mountain. And no one knew anything about glass—I didn’t know anyone who did—and I figured it was up to me to figure it out, you know. And I—start reading books and stuff, and trying all sorts of things. I was a huge admirer of Tiffany glass, and other glass at the time. You know, Egyptian glass I also was much taken with. Those were the two main things, I kind of looked at whatever I could find. Mostly, you know, I think early on in life I kind of learned to do things by trial and error, and that’s pretty much what I did. I did—I tried analyzing from a physicist’s point of view, glassblowing, which I [laughs] tried to impart to some students up at Haystack [Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine] one year, which didn’t fly very well. But, but anyway, I was just trying to understand the process.

Permalink

Mark Peiser describes how his background in science and engineering eventually led to his interest in glass.

2:01 Transcript

Mark Peiser describes how his background in science and engineering eventually led to his interest in glass. Oral history interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:00.

Mark Peiser: It was always assumed I would have a career in science and engineering. I always assumed it, too. And I always, I felt—still feel—I have an affinity for that. And so I—in high school, I was kind of the, I think I put it down as the math and science guy, you know, who played piano. And—but then I got to—when I went—it just seemed natural. I’d done a lot of electrical stuff. And I signed up for electrical engineering, I went to Purdue [Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana] in that. And after a couple of years, I started to get, get lost in the theory of it. It got—there was a moment when there was about fifteen foot of blackboard covered with some equation, and the professor says, ‘Now if we substitute four-foot-long equation for that.’ And I said, you know, ‘Well, why?’ And he thought awhile and he says, ‘Well, if we do it’ll all work out.’ And I—that was the last time I went to that class. I mean, I liked the guy, but you know, I just lost it. Anyway, I ended up going to the Institute of Design, IIT [Chicago, Illinois], in design, and—which was really a much better fit for me. I did—well, I did well. But then, that—well, like I said, that kind of led to the model business, and then I kind of led—kind of dissolved into the glass thing. [laughs]

Permalink

Mark Peiser talks about early Penland and Bill Brown.

0:55 Transcript

Mark Peiser talks about early Penland and Bill Brown. Oral History Interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:37.

Mark Peiser: I mean, some folks at Penland during their residencies there—I mean, there was a woman who was a—well, a fiber artist of some sort, at one point. She just took up gardening. You know, cleaned up. I mean, anything, anything, you know, to improve the place. Mostly anything, I mean, truly, and that was the deal. Well, the deal was really quite wonderful, actually. You know, what Penland—like I said earlier, it was a time when there was a question whether anybody could make a living doing studio craft. And Bill Brown, you know, wanted to encourage that to happen, and that’s why he created this thing.

Permalink

Mark Peiser discusses Dudley Giberson’s contributions to studio glass through his equipment developments and inventions.

Playing01:32 Transcript
Mark Peiser

Mark Peiser discusses Dudley Giberson’s contributions to studio glass through his equipment developments and inventions. Oral history interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:32.

Mark Peiser: And Dudley was one of the people that I talked to, or learned stuff from, technically back then. Like I said, he invented these—the burner heads, he invented an automatic gaffer’s bench, which was kind of a cool thing. Which, actually, I taught a year at RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York] and I had a guy, a vet, who was in the program there and had both legs missing, and anyway, we got him one of these benches and he could actually make glass, you know. Dudley, you know, he’s built the business winding coils for annealers. He’s also done a research paper and demonstrated what seems to me a pretty convincing explanation for how the Egyptian core vessels were made, which none of the authorities want to acknowledge. He’s done a whole lot of very, very interesting and thoughtful things. He was a real thinker, you know? That contributed to and especially this burner thing. It sounds simple, but I bet, I don’t know, 70-80% of the studios use these things, and they’re quiet and peaceful environments because of that.

Permalink

Mark Peiser discusses being a cofounder of the Glass Arts Society (GAS).

Playing00:45 Transcript
Mark Peiser

Mark Peiser discusses being a co-founder of the Glass Arts Society (GAS). Oral history interview with Mark Peiser by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:45.

Mark Peiser: I’m not much of an organization man, but yeah, I did kind of say, ‘Wait a minute, we need to make some sort of a—we need an organization here, you know, to do that.’ And I did—I was responsible for saying that much of it and then, you know, I was involved a bit at the beginning. I think I was the first comptroller [laughs] whatever that was supposed to be, I don’t remember ever doing anything in that regard. But, of course, I knew all the people and was involved in some of the discussions about, you know, what it should be.

Permalink

Mark Peiser relays a story about a piece he made with Dale Brownscombe in a 1979 interview with Paul Hollister.

Playing01:42 Transcript
Mark Peiser

Mark Peiser relays a story about a piece he made with Dale Brownscombe in a 1979 interview with Paul Hollister. Paul Hollister Interview with Mark Peiser, May 2, 1979. (Rakow title: Mark Peiser interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168400). Clip length: 01:28.

Paul Hollister (PH): How long does a vase take? On the average—

Mark Peiser (MP): Well, that thing took 14 hours on the pipe. Some of these—I mean even the [inaudible] again was about six or seven hours—

PH: What do you do with the [inaudible], I mean—?

MP: Well, you just—

PH: —you just have to keep going through it?MP: —plenty of stories. Well, I don’t know. I forget which piece it was we did, but Dale [Brownscombe] and I, one day last winter we were doing a piece. We didn’t get started until later in the afternoon; a lot of things came up through the day, so around—God, it was around about 11 o’clock at night, we were just famished. We did lunch at noon and we just got tired and we knew that there was like six hours left to go on this piece. So there was a lot of snow, it was very cold, and there was a bunch of snow, and I live up about a mile from the studio up on top of the hill and I said, ‘I quit,’ you know, ‘keep this thing warm. I’m gonna go and raid the icebox and bring back all these groceries and cold cuts and stuff.’ So I took his car and drove up to my place and the damn car died, and I couldn’t get it started again. I had this big box of groceries. It was a beautiful night. It was about 10 degrees out and the moon was out and the air was clear, and I screwed around for about 20 minutes trying to get the car started, and that wouldn’t work, and so I ended up walking down this damn mountain back a mile to the shop with this big cardboard box of groceries, and I was thinking, ‘My God. I’m blowing a piece. This is—this is truly some perversion of the process.’

Permalink

Bibliography

Writings by Paul Hollister Bibliography

“Mark Peiser—Durchdringung des Innenraumes / Exploration of Inner Space.” Neues Glas, no. 3 (1984): 126–33.

PDF