This year, I spent St. Patrick's Day at Locally Grown Art in Pittsboro, N.C. with Jonathan Davis. At 28, he's been making art from glass blowing and fire torching for eight years.
Jonathan blows a bubble of glass in front of his torch. This is the beginning of a wine glass bowl.
Here, Jonathan shapes the bowl with an iron tool. His blow torch gets up to 4,000 degrees, however, the studio was pretty cold because of his awesome ventilation system.
This picture makes me want to play with fire all day long. Here he spins the bowl to even out the imperfections in the glass.
Jonathan clamps of excess glass from a marble he made during my visit. This, unlike the wine glass bowl is solid glass.
Jonathan polishes the marble in a graphite tool that has a dimple for the marble to sit in.
The purple, carolina blue and orange marble at last! It was still a little hot to touch and could have shattered during the cooling process, but it survived!