Chris Dowdy:

GLASS

Little windows
clarity of visions
brief flashes
of brightened light
in a melting world
fading away
mind body
spirit focus
to action
beyond thought
gently cooling
form shaping
freezing a sun
creation
imagination
broken free
soaking
waiting
for a cooled birth
into the world forever.

Poetry maybe not, but that wouldn't explain glass either. You know it’s not really frozen, just slowed down a whole lot. I could search forever and never find a more amazing substance. It's electrically non-conductive, but when molten it's highly conductive. It’s everywhere in our world.  All around us.  Used in everything. Machines make amazing glass bottles, perfect every time - tubes for computers, monitors, components in capacitors, windows and windshields. Nature makes glass.  Volcanoes produce it as magma and  it hits the surface and rapidly cools into obsidian. Lightning makes it when it strikes sandy ground, if you're really, really careful you can dig up the fulgurite, the lightning bolt frozen in glass. Meteors impact the earth and make rare types of glass as the energy is released into the materials they impact into. Man also makes glass, imagination free formed into shape by pure will power and determination. Practice is the key, but with glass there is more to understand.  You have to evolve, flow with the glass, experiment with the colors, embrace the traditions and look for new in the old, drive forward, experiment with form. Become the silica cast in, burn and then cool, never stop wondering why or if. Glass offers me the comfort of understanding coupled with the constant thrill of growth and discovery. I live in a perpetual state of believing it can't get any better -- and then it does. It becomes more complex and dives down into another level. Control leads to understanding which leads to control.  The circle is complete and never ending, like the glass itself, which is infinitely recyclable.

Who We Are:

Jim McKelvey Co-Founder	Doug Auer Co-Founder
Anne Murphy Director of Marketing & Development Cody Meirick Special Events Manager Lisa Volner Gallery Assistant
Instructors:
Mike Hayes	Nik Christensen
Amber Marshall	Ben Klein
Aaron Quigley	Jessica (Cope) Kopitske
Chris Dowdy	Whit Rogers
Shawn Lipe

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