Martin Blank talks about teamwork and the ability to intuit what a glassblower needs in the Venetians demonstration. Oral history interview with Martin Blank by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 31, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:13.

Martin Blank: For me that’s a—I just got out of the glory hole, the thing’s fiery hot, it’s moving all over the place, and I get it to the bench and then Lino jumps in, and boom, you kick it and the goalie misses, and you get a goal, and it’s like there’s that intensity of the teamwork and the support that you have to give each team member in order for this object to manifest. It is a form. It’s a funny kind of alchemy. It’s a liquid, right? And most liquids take the shape of their container; but we, with our air and our intuition and our skills, our honed skills, are able to take a liquid and create it into a volume. And then adorn it by creating objects that we apply to the side. So there is an unspoken language that you have amongst highly skilled glass workers that’s universal. So up at Pilchuck [Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington] I see a Japanese master working and I’m able to just make a gesture, ‘Oh you need this now.’ And he’d be like, ‘Ey ye ye,’ I and I would run over and I knew exactly what he needed, and then I could see him struggling cause I knew because I had been there before, you know, what he was—what we were trying to do.