Image courtesy of Randall Grubb.

Randall Grubb

Artist Randall Grubb (1961– ) discovered glassblowing while an undergraduate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He became interested in paperweights and flameworking techniques while working with paperweight maker Chris Buzzini at Correia Art Glass in nearby Santa Monica, California, where Grubb was employed as an equipment builder while still in college. In the mid-1980s, Grubb moved to Oregon and began making glass paperweights in his own studio. After twenty successful years as a paperweight artist, Grubb began to combine his artistic experience with his lifelong interest in metalworking and love of hot rods. He currently designs and builds specialty collector cars from the ground up.

Works

Octopuses Garden, 1997. Glass. Image courtesy of Randall Grubb.

Daisy, 1997. Glass. Image courtesy of Randall Grubb.

Falconer Dodici, 2016. Image courtesy of Randall Grubb.

Randall Grubb talks about the importance of industry supplying glass formulated for glassblowing to universities.

Playing1:06 Transcript
Randall Grubb

Randall Grubb talks about the importance of industry supplying glass formulated for glassblowing to universities. Oral history interview with Randall Grubb by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 4, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:06.

Randall Grubb: There’s such a difference between glass that’s actually formulated for glassblowing, which remains soft and malleable and, and carries the heat for a long time, versus bottle glass, which is made to be shot into a steel mold, and solidify instantly and hold the shape, and not be molten for excessive amounts of time. So—and everybody has access to broken bottles, but to get your hands on blowing glass, that was so huge. And the ability to get your hands on these beautiful colors, you know, cobalt blue, emerald green, black. We, you know—it was just great. So. So yeah. And yeah, the support of the arts by industry, That’s what—and we don’t have that anymore. So yeah.

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Randall Grubb explains the difference between torch working and lampworking.

Playing00:54 Transcript
Randall Grubb

Randall Grubb explains the difference between torch working and lampworking. Oral history interview with Randall Grubb by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 24, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:54.

Randall Grubb: You know, in lampwork, you’re working over an open flame and you’re creating a three-dimensional object, in space, right in front of you. You can hold that three-dimensional object in your hand. That’s lampworking. Torch working is you’re working on a surface of glass, and you’re drawing, and pressing the, the leaf into the glass. That’s totally different than creating a three-dimensional leaf you can hold in your hand. So the techniques are very, very different, although the result sometimes can look very similar. The torchwork lacks the three dimensionality of the lampwork, because lampwork is three-dimensional. It’s made three dimensionally, in space, it’s a flower, it’s absolutely three-dimensional.

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Randall Grubb talks about Chris Buzzini’s contribution to torch working.

Playing01:28 Transcript
Randall Grubb

Randall Grubb talks about Chris Buzzini’s contribution to torch working. Oral history interview with Randall Grubb by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 24, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:28.

Randall Grubb: So Chris, his history should really be based on his contribution to torch working, which is huge. I really think that although he’s an unbelievable lampworker, he never penetrated the market and never made a name like Paul [Stankard]. Chris was very good at building multiple layers. So here again—through playing with different techniques and pushing these techniques, it blurs the line between the two disciplines. Because oftentimes, you know, it almost takes an expert to determine which of these techniques is being used. And Chris, really, blurred the line with all of his, his personal Bridgeton Studio, that was the name of the studio that Chris had when he was in New Jersey, and then he went on to be one of the founding members of Orient & Flume in Chico, California, that was famous for the torchworking on the large vases and the beautiful, rich imagery that you can create that way. Chris was one of the pioneers, and then he brought it to Correia studios [Correia Art Glass, Santa Monica, California] at the same time. So looking honestly, retrospectively at his career, his contribution to the torch working world, because he cross pollinated and brought that torch to so many studios, and gave them the ability to do that imagery. That’s Chris’s legacy, in my opinion.

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Randall Grubb talks about how he and Chris Buzzini had been attempting to make paperweights on their own.

Playing02:06 Transcript
Randall Grubb

Randall Grubb talks about how he and Chris Buzzini had been attempting to make paperweights on their own. Oral history interview with Randall Grubb by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 24, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:06.

Randall Grubb: Chris had an inkling and we’d gotten a Carlisle CC burner so we could start to make these little tiny lampwork parts. So it was while Chris and I were both employed at Correia [Correia Art Glass, Santa Monica, California]. Chris had the knowledge. I had the desire and the ability to build equipment. So between the two of us, we—the two of us started down the path. And like I say, Chris didn’t have all the equipment, so I culled the equipment together. Like I said, the vacuum pump from my grandfather’s dental office is still the one that Chris used. So I’m going over to Chris’s house, and Chris is making these little lampwork parts, and I’m, and I’m looking over his shoulder and I’m going, ‘Yeah, I can make those too, probably.’ And then, we’re working on ‘em, and the very first paperweight that Chris made, I have, because we made it together. So we’re already independently going down the path of making lampwork paperweights. We’re already committed to the process. We just don’t have a perfected technique. And then all of a sudden, Paul announces that Penland is going to have Paul Stankard, and he’s gonna teach. Wow. Well, this is the—this is the final step. This is the—we’re going to get the critique, and we’re going to get to watch the master and our little problems—the little problems—our work—like I say, we’re making flowers, we’re putting them in, in glass balls, but they’ve got what looks like dew covering the flowers. And that dew is actually little tiny bubbles of air, due to the fact that the temperature wasn’t correct for the flower to have the clear glass put over it. This is a very subtle, subtle, subtlety within the technique, and it was Paul that when we went to that workshop, we saw—see Paul pick up a hand torch and warm up the set up right before he hits it with the glass. That was the only thing we weren’t doing. And his paperweights come out beautiful.

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Randall Grubb talks about how tiny Paul Stankard’s flameworked elements actually are.

Playing00:54 Transcript
Randall Grubb

Randall Grubb talks about how tiny Paul Stankard’s flameworked elements actually are. Oral history interview with Randall Grubb by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 24, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:54.

Randall Grubb: Paul came from the scientific glassworking world, where you use Pyrex. And you hold, you know, a little bit of Pyrex, you know—half a pound of Pyrex in each hand, and you weld it together, and you make these fabulous scientific instruments out of it. Or, you know, Paul’s, you know, making these little tiny flowers, these little flower bouquets that we would make, the daisy is the size of your thumbnail. This is micro, little tiny stuff. Each petal is, you know, imagine, you know, a 25 petal daisy that fits on your thumbnail. Those are little tiny—each petal is teeny. And—very, very micro work. And then you take the top and bottom gathers that we would encase the lampwork with, it was a 400 gram top and a 150 gram bottom. So, you know, it wasn’t even two pounds of glass.

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Randall Grubb talks about discovering a flyer for Penland’s flameworking workshop.

Playing02:10 Transcript
Randall Grubb

Randall Grubb talks about discovering a flyer for Penland’s flameworking workshop. Oral history interview with Randall Grubb by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 24, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:10.

Randall Grubb: You know, Steve Correia at the time was a big name, doing the Tiffany copies with the iridescent feather patterns, and all that beautiful type of glass. And I was an equipment builder at Correia [Correia Art Glass, Santa Monica, California], and it was there that I met Chris Buzzini, who was the resident paperweight maker, and he was making these beautiful torchwork paperweights, and it was there that I saw a flyer for a, a lampwork paperweight. And it talked about Paul Stankard and some of the other lampwork—you know, and the antique French pieces. And so I took that flyer and I asked Steve about it. I said, ‘Hey, what’s these—what are these paperweights? Well, I’ve never seen paperweights like this.’ And Steve’s answer was, ‘Well, now those are really specialized; they’re really hard to make. There’s only one or two guys that even know how to make those things. And, it’s a real specialized market. And don’t worry about it cause they’re too hard to make.’ And so it was at that point that, you know, being a entrepreneur student, competition is not your friend, specialization and hyper specialization is, there again, dad’s mantra, you know, ‘Be the best cobbler, not just any cobbler.’ So for some reason, I decide I want to learn how to make these paperweights, and I’m talking to Chris Buzzini at lunch one day and he says, ‘Well, I know something about that. You know, I lived in New Jersey and I met those guys back there.’ And it was a very—the only guys that knew how to make these were Paul Stankard and a couple other guys, and they were all New Jersey-based. And it was the best kept secret in New Jersey. And, and since Chris worked—had a studio in New Jersey, he had started to crack the code a little bit, and had a little bit of information. And so I step in and he needs more equipment, though; he doesn’t have a vacuum pump and some other things. And my grandfather’s vacuum pump from his dental office is still, to this day, the vacuum pump that Chris Buzzini uses. It is my grandfather’s dental vacuum pump. So here again, I put the—I helped Chris get the equipment together and we started to play around with, ‘How do we make these paperweights?’ And so that’s when it came up that Paul Stankard was going to teach this class at Penland. We both jumped on it.

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Randall Grubb talks about hot glass.

Playing2:15 Transcript
Randall Grubb

Randall Grubb talks about discovering a flyer for Penland’s flameworking workshop. Oral history interview with Randall Grubb by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 24, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:10.

Randall Grubb: You know, Steve Correia at the time was a big name, doing the Tiffany copies with the iridescent feather patterns, and all that beautiful type of glass. And I was an equipment builder at Correia [Correia Art Glass, Santa Monica, California], and it was there that I met Chris Buzzini, who was the resident paperweight maker, and he was making these beautiful torchwork paperweights, and it was there that I saw a flyer for a, a lampwork paperweight. And it talked about Paul Stankard and some of the other lampwork—you know, and the antique French pieces. And so I took that flyer and I asked Steve about it. I said, ‘Hey, what’s these—what are these paperweights? Well, I’ve never seen paperweights like this.’ And Steve’s answer was, ‘Well, now those are really specialized; they’re really hard to make. There’s only one or two guys that even know how to make those things. And, it’s a real specialized market. And don’t worry about it cause they’re too hard to make.’ And so it was at that point that, you know, being a entrepreneur student, competition is not your friend, specialization and hyper specialization is, there again, dad’s mantra, you know, ‘Be the best cobbler, not just any cobbler.’ So for some reason, I decide I want to learn how to make these paperweights, and I’m talking to Chris Buzzini at lunch one day and he says, ‘Well, I know something about that. You know, I lived in New Jersey and I met those guys back there.’ And it was a very—the only guys that knew how to make these were Paul Stankard and a couple other guys, and they were all New Jersey-based. And it was the best kept secret in New Jersey. And, and since Chris worked—had a studio in New Jersey, he had started to crack the code a little bit, and had a little bit of information. And so I step in and he needs more equipment, though; he doesn’t have a vacuum pump and some other things. And my grandfather’s vacuum pump from his dental office is still, to this day, the vacuum pump that Chris Buzzini uses. It is my grandfather’s dental vacuum pump. So here again, I put the—I helped Chris get the equipment together and we started to play around with, ‘How do we make these paperweights?’ And so that’s when it came up that Paul Stankard was going to teach this class at Penland. We both jumped on it.

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Randall Grubb describes providing the University of Southern California with high-quality glass from Correa.

Playing02:16 Transcript
Randall Grubb

Randall Grubb describes providing the University of Southern California with high-quality glass from Correia. Oral history interview with Randall Grubb by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 24, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:16.

Randall Grubb: I was forbidden to pick up a blowpipe at work, but one of my jobs at night often was to change the color in the color tank. So you got to shovel out a hundred pounds of cobalt blue, shovel it into a bucket full of water, turn it into cullet, throw it away, and then refill the furnace with green glass, ‘cause tomorrow we want to have green. No problem. ‘Hey Steve, this hundred pounds of blue cobalt that I just dug out of here, how’d you like to donate it to USC glassblowing program?’ ‘Sure, that’d be great. Go ahead. Take it.’ ‘Great.’ So I loaded in my truck, and I take it over to USC [University of Southern California], where I had three furnaces of my own that I had built, and I had a full glassblowing facility virtually of my own, because I had built it for USC. USC is a business school. It always struggled to get the minimum number of glassblowers to run the program. There would never be more than 10 or 15 people in a class. So here again, the fact that I’m living on campus, living in a fraternity near campus and could ride my bike over—hell, I lived at the glassblowing studio, blowing glass day and night. You know, I’d ride back to the fraternity house all sweaty after—at 10 o’clock at night to join the fraternity party, because Randy had been at the glassblowing studio all evening, blowing glass. So it was—it was the most unbelievable situation. Here, they’ve, they forbid me to blow glass at work, but yet they’re giving me the beautiful, soft, blowable glass that we’re melting at Correia [Correia Art Glass, Santa Monica, California]. A special formula that’s made for glassblowing, not like the old bottle glass that were—that we normally had at USC, just broken bottles that were remelting. No, this is actual—beautiful colors, and so I had two different color furnaces and a clear tank at SC. So I’d go to SC, and I had, like—and SC is paying for the gas, and paying for the whole thing. So I mean, what a—talk about, you know—you feel like you’re robbing the bank. It was just like, too good to be true.

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