Paul M. Hollister Collection, The Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass
Transcribed by Bard Graduate Center
Title: Jay Musler Interview for Paul Hollister, October 11, 1984 (Rakow title: Jay Musler interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168398).
Jay Musler, Narrator
Location: Probably studio of Jay Musler, San Francisco, California
Colleen Terrell, Transcriber
Barb Elam, Editor
Lauren Drapala, Summary
Duration: 37:38
Length: 7 pages

Notes: This transcript is based upon an audiotaped recording that has been digitally converted. The recording is part of the Paul M. Hollister Collection at The Rakow Research Library at The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, and was transcribed at Bard Graduate Center, New York, New York, for the digital exhibition and archive Voices in Studio Glass History: Art and Craft, Maker and Place, and the Critical Writings and Photography of Paul Hollister. Usage requests for all or part of this transcript must be obtained from The Rakow Research Library at The Corning Museum of Glass. 

Paul Hollister often made audio recordings for research purposes in preparation for writing, including interviews with artists and curators, and lectures. The reader should bear in mind that transcriptions of these recordings reflect spoken, rather than written, prose. While every effort was made to be as accurate as possible, the sound quality of the recordings in the Paul Hollister Collection varies greatly. Transcripts have been edited for readability and occasionally condensed. They should serve as a best-effort guide to the original only and not be considered verbatim.

Born in Sacramento, California, artist Jay Musler (1949– ) attended the California College of the Arts in Oakland from 1968 to 1971, where he studied glass under Marvin Lipofsky. Musler joined Maslach Art Glass in Greenbrae, California, in 1972 and worked there for several years until he established his own studio in the Bay Area. Musler’s pieces are known for their incorporation of cut and sandblasted glass techniques. Many are assembled and include the application of oil paint.

Summary: In this recording made for Paul Hollister, Jay Musler describes his early interest in ceramics and glass as a high school student and later as a college student studying with Marvin Lipofsky. He describes the early years of his career working at Maslach Art Glass, his inspiration from Italian and Scandinavian glass, and the influence of Pacific Northwest basket weaving on his work. He also details the intention and technical aspects of some of his pieces during the 1970s and 1980s.

Mentioned: California College of Arts and Crafts [later California College of the Arts], The Corning Museum of Glass, glassblowing, Marvin Lipofsky, Paul Marioni, Steven Maslach, New Glass: A Worldwide Survey, 1979, National Endowment for the Arts, painting, sandblasting, sawing, Therman Statom

Related asset: Paul Hollister, “Jay Musler’s Painted Glass: The Face of Anger.” Neues Glas, no. 1 (January/March 1985): 12.

Jay Musler (JM): Hi, Paul. Well, I’m gonna start my interview on the tape, and I’ll try to get as much information on here as I can, and I hope that will be really helpful to you when you put this article together. I guess I’ll start by saying I was born in Sacramento, California, in 1949. It was, you know, growing up in the suburbs and no big cities around or anything like that. It was pretty rural, lots of farmland, rivers to swim in. Just sort of, in general, growing up normal. The high school I went to had a very good art department. I was introduced to ceramics, and I liked it so much I had it for three years in high school. Towards the end of my senior year, my art teacher, who was very—well, who really influenced me, he would always recommend me to read books. And I know he recommended Summerhill [A.S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (Hart Publishing Company, 1960)], which really influenced my way of thinking. But he also became interested in glass. He wanted to make his own stained glass, so by doing so he built a small furnace, and he would ask students to help. And being in the Ceramics Department, I jumped right in—for some reason, I don’t know why [laughs]. But he sort of wanted to pour glass on steel slabs and try rolling it out. And in the meantime, he had also purchased some blowpipes, and he had the necessary tools and wooden blocks and he sort of—after we finished helping him, then he would let us try our hand at actually blowing the glass rather than pouring it and trying to roll it. But I became interested in glass. I really almost fell in love with it. I became obsessed with it. And so he recommended that I go study with Marvin Lipofsky at the College of Arts and Crafts [California College of Arts and Crafts, now California College of the Arts, Oakland, California]. So after high school I kind of hung around a little bit, and then I sort of packed up my bags and the following summer, and I went down and I talked to Martin Lipofsky, and he said, ‘Well, okay, I’ll let you in the class,’ and [laughs] I started in the summer of 1968. And I liked the glass program.

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed]

What I liked most about it was that Marvin would always be holding symposiums. He would invite a lot of artists from all over the country, and some artists also from Europe, to come and lecture and give demonstrations. And I was always really fascinated by this. I imagine being young, and it had quite an influence on me. I remember artists Joel [Philip] Myers and Dale Chihuly and—let’s see. Did I say Mark Peiser? Mark Peiser, and, oh, who else? Erik Höglund from Sweden and Ann Wärff and—oh, I could just go on and on, but there were lots of influences starting right there. And of course, that’s what really sort of kept me going in the glass program at the College of Arts and Crafts.

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed]

I think the most interesting thing about these artists was that they were individually doing their own artwork. And to meet somebody who was in that position was always a big influence on me. And, because of the certain skills that they had; I always was interested in that, too. Also while I was a student at Arts and Crafts I also worked in other mediums. My main interest was sculpture. We had lots of opportunities in the glass program to take our work just beyond glassblowing. I incorporated glass with other materials, as wood, plastic. I started actually painting on the glass while I was a student going to school. Why I started painting on the glass I don’t really know. I think because I was using glass with other materials, and I was also painting these other materials, I just started painting on the glass. And I was getting really interesting results. I realized that I was going to be leaving school, and I thought that rather than go—when I left school rather than getting a regular job, that there had to be other alternatives. One alternative would be—where I could stay close to my artwork—would be to try to get a job in one of the numerous glass studios that were starting to build up around the Bay Area. One person who hired me was Steve Maslach. And he hired me in 1972, a year after I left school at the College of Arts and Crafts. And basically when I went to Steve’s studio and started working, we really had nothing in mind. And I guess what both of us started to do, or—was even develop our skills more in glass. My main interests were just blowing, and I know that Steve was developing his interests in building equipment and learning glass formulas and running a production studio and the whole aspect of it all. And my main job was just to blow the glass. And we got quite good at it and started hiring, or Steve started to hire more people [mechanical sound as of grinding or sandblasting or polishing in the background, as in a workshop], and I found a whole new interesting realm of glass and that was the production glass studio. And it’s just totally fascinating, getting into this. And I think most of my influence at that time was from Europe. I really admired the Italians, the way they blew glass and especially their stemware. How fine it was and of course the Scandinavians because of the way they sort of put some kind of—they—

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed]

I thought the Scandinavians were very playful with the way they handled the glass, and they looked at it in a very intellectual way. And I think that these were really great influences on me when I was actually a glassblower at Maslach’s. Also at the time I had met other artists who were in the Bay Area working in glass. One in particular was Paul Marioni. I liked his approach. It’s sort of a social commentary. And I would frequently visit his studio and he would let me use his equipment sometimes. And so I got to a point where I would make pieces at the studio, and I would take them home, think about them, and then I would take them to Paul’s and work out my ideas. And after a while, I—you know, it got to the point where I really wanted to start getting back into working on individual pieces and developing my ideas as an artist. And this actual formula seemed to be pretty good. I could do work, oh, on lunch break or after work, and then I could sort of take it to a studio—someone else’s studio—and finish the work up. And in 1976 I moved from Marin County to San Francisco. And this was the first time I’d ever lived in a really big city. And it was such an influence. I mean there were museums, and there was, you know, socially, it was, I was more outgoing, and I really started getting around a lot more and seeing a lot more things, and going to museums I particularly became interested in primitive art. And there were a few shows that came through San Francisco in these early years, and one show that really influenced me was the Pacific Northwest or Northwest Coast Indian art. And I really became intrigued with the baskets, the basket forms. And so I thought that I could probably start producing this work in glass. And I think my first attempt at this was the Woven Bowl, which was engraved on the outside and sandblasted on the inside. And by doing this, there wasn’t any contrast, so by getting some contrast I started rubbing oil paint into the areas that had been engraved and sandblasted, and this sort of created a nice three-dimensional effect, a dark color against a light color.

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed]

Another thing that influenced me to continue in this mode was that I entered this piece into the New Glass, which was the worldwide survey that was put on by The Corning Museum of Glass [New Glass: A Worldwide Survey, exhibition organized by The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, 1979], and the piece was accepted. And this sort of made me think that, well, okay, I think I will pursue this more seriously. So the next step that I wanted to do was start doing the work on a bigger scale. Now at Maslach Glass [Maslach Art Glass, Greenbrae, California, now closed] we had been doing work with lighting, so we were making lampshades and we had the necessary molds in order to blow very large pieces. And it was good because all you had to do is blow a piece into one of these molds, put it into the annealing oven. The next day you could take it out, you could score the line around the perimeter of this form and separate the top from the bottom, which left you with a fairly good-size form and you basically—or at least I didn’t have to go through all the process of having to punty up the bowl and finish it on the top and whatnot. And I wanted to sort of continue with this idea of the baskets and one thing I wanted to do is break up the perimeter of the bowl by using saw cuts. And these lines from the top would continue down and sort of, I would sort of try to come up with these very irregular sort of looking glass baskets. Well, what happened is I was using a glass diamond saw—which was turning at 3,000 RPMs. And when I would attempt to saw the tops of these bowls, I mean sometimes it would rip off large [laughs] sections of the glass bowls or it was just impossible to get very fine cuts. And sometimes I would come up with these jagged edges, and then I said, ‘Well, gee, I kinda like this.’ And it sort of made me think about what I was doing and especially trying to do something as fine as these baskets. And I thought, well, this to me it means something else, just looking at these bowls now. They’re a lot more irregular than I wanted them to be and yet there’s something about them. And they just seem to sort of provoke a different sort of feeling inside of me. You know, they’d looked sort of violent, and so I thought that, well, okay, this also sort of kind of goes along with social commentary, and maybe you could carry a political message even with a vessel, even that made out of glass. So I started developing these vessels with the jagged edges and I started using colors like reds and blacks and flesh tones and whatnot. I guess mainly because certain colors provoke certain feelings of anger and alienation and whatnot. I also found that these vessels were becoming popular with galleries and collectors. And so I really wanted to start carrying through these ideas. And by doing so I started buying my own equipment. Now, with my own equipment I sort of had a little better control over what I was doing, and I was able to get into making finer cuts on the glass, or I also started airbrushing colors on instead of rubbing them in, which made the color come out more even and more fine-looking. And I found the use of a good sandblaster. Another thing that helped me at this time—this was around 1980—I was invited back as a guest artist to the California College of Arts and Crafts by Marvin Lipofsky. I started working around students, and there was just sort of an explosion of an exchange of ideas and what was going on, and things really started happening again. Also at this time by some chance I ran across these large Pyrex domes, which were discards from the bottoms of bell jars that were made by the Corning Glass Works [now Corning, Inc., Corning, New York] for scientific purposes. Well, I found that these large domes, which were 18 inches in diameter, may—had even more surface area to work with, and their size just sort of made them look more powerful. So I started kind of developing my ideas. When I said social commentary ideas, I was thinking of more of, like, urban kind of living. And pieces that I started to do at that time like Cityscape, had sort of these urban landscapes, and some of the times I would glue spikes on to the bowls that sort of were representative of missiles, and then this would be offset by jagged edges, which would sort of stand for aggression and just kind of centered around ideas of how everything seemed to be okay on the outside, but underneath things didn’t seem to be okay. And I was really disturbed about a lot of these events that were going on around the world and—

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed]

—and also events that were going on within our own government. Now, I guess at this point you could call me the angry artist because it really started showing up more and more in my work. As I started throwing the paint around on the inside surface of these vessels, I sort of started to discard the airbrush technique, and I started to use the paintbrush instead. And this started to open up new ideas and new influences. And I became interested in painting faces on the inside of the bowls. And my idea about painting was I like to paint really fast, almost sort of like in a graffiti kind of way. And these paintings were done very fast on the insides of these bowls. And they were also very, you know, the message with these were—they were really urban, and it was kind of like these faces, which kind of represents the human being and human condition, being surrounded by something where there’s really no escape for your desires or your needs. And also at this point I felt that I wanted to leave the vessel form and try to work more sculpturally. Even though I did consider the bowls to be sculpture, I wanted to kind of break away from the vessel form. And with the ideas that I carried through with the vessels, I wanted to take those ideas, and also by using glass and sandblasting and painting, put all of this into a more sculptural formula. And at this time I was also getting to the point where the domes were getting harder to find. My supply was dwindling. So I sort of switched to using plate glass, which I found pretty exciting to use. And I know there were other artists that were using plate glass. Therman Statom—he sort of had influenced me. And I started getting more into using epoxy and silicone and found this really helped in sort of, you know, really pushing the glass farther into these new forms. And I think this started to come out in pieces like—

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed]

—the tableaus, which I started to do about 1982. And these were sort of like street scenes, and they sort of evolved around urban decay, moral decay. Now, another thing about this work is that it wasn’t quite as popular as the vessel points. So I knew that either the work was sort of getting into a whole different realm. It was sort of getting out of the craft world mentality and getting more into a—

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed]

I—think these tableaus were beginning to become more direct and more figurative, whereas the vessel forms were more abstract. Now, at this point, I became aware that my whole life was beginning to become centered around this sort of doomsday attitude. And I really sort of wanted to change my way of thinking. I wanted to see if I could sort of push myself towards more peaceful, restful ways of thinking about art. And so what I thought I would start with would be a sort of the perfect metaphor, and that would be the boat form. And these boat forms were sort of like—to kind of make me feel like I was sort of floating along with my ideas. And that maybe they would lead me in a different direction. And as I found out, that the more I went along with these forms they started to go—revert back to—

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed]

—they started to revert more back to the violent imagery. And I found that the last piece, which I did when I was working on this series, sort of made it clear to me that the sort of only way to attain peace of mind is through death, which is represented in this piece called Death. [sound of tape recorder button being pushed] Now one thing I do want to make clear that made it possible for me to work this way was that I did receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982. Paul I’m gonna turn the tape over now; it seems to be running out and I will continue going on the other side.

[sound of tape recorder being stopped and restarted]

So as I was saying, when I did receive this grant, I really wanted to take advantage of the time it allows you to really experiment with your ideas. Actually to really try to develop your ideas. So after I finished the boat forms, I started going back more into a more figurative way of working again. And I started working with these forms, which I really don’t know why I actually started working this way. The story behind these cone-shaped mask heads is that I got together with Therman in 1983 when he was a guest artist at the College of Arts and Crafts, and we started working on these forms. And I had no idea at this time that I would actually [clears throat] start making the mask heads with him, with these forms that Therman blew for me. I know at this point my ideas seemed to be developing more towards nature, and the landscape. And I was trying to think of some way where I could tie that into the human condition.

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed]

These masks forms, they sit—

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed]

—on a base. The space is sort of like a house. Inside the house, you can faintly see sort of like a symbol of a dead tree. And I really haven’t been able to figure out what that really means to me, but I think the fact that here—is this—enclosed form, it seems to me that it sort of stems from the idea that we have something inside of us that we really don’t know about, that we really don’t understand. And the mask that sort of hoovers [JM pronounces this word as rhyming with “losers,” not as “hovers”] or sits over this base.

[sound of tape recorder button being pushed; an inaudible word embedded in the sound, and it seems as though JM has been stopping, rewinding, and recording over some of his words at certain points throughout the tape.]

I think that this form sort of represents some meaning of domination, or that we sort of dominate ourselves from our true feelings. We [sound of engine in the background] really don’t let ourselves really express ourselves the way we want to, or the way we should. And we sort of have this concealed identity. And then from these head forms, on the bases, I’ve also moved on to just a straight mask form, which I just recently started working on. The dominant feature of the masks is the eye. And also there are sort of receptor-like shards, and also mouths. And all of these sort of symbolize our different senses and ways of expression. And I think the masks visually describe an evolution of our—that our senses are going through.

[recording ends]