There is one thing I’ve never liked about you
Born in the late 70s or early 80s, Courtney Branam, Rebecca Chernow, Darin Denison, Dan Friday, and Sam McMillen started blowing glass around their late teens or early twenties. Only three of them went to college, only two of them studied glass there. Two of them were born in the Northwest; one of them is Native. All five of them are among the most gifted working artists in the Northwest, though they spend the majority of their time creating other artists designs in glass. Their hand skills, aesthetic sensibility and communication skills are practiced and stretched each day, resulting in an incredible sense of proportion, composition and presentation. This is quite typical of the glassblowers found in the shops around this area.
There are a lot of different theories and myths about why so much glass is worked in the Northwest: a temperate climate, an already thriving DIY culture, specific artists and schools. But there is something deeper to this, something that doesn’t leave so much to chance.
There is one thing I’ve never liked about you.
There is something about this area. A place like Whidbey Island, with its old school funkiness, seems designed for the kind of artists and shops that have developed there. This kind of energy was so necessary to the beginning years, lots of little shops and their industrious, independent owners willing to put in the necessary time to learn the craft. And as the Northwest has grown and changed, so has the glass community. Besides being able to produce large quantities in high quality, in Seattle you can also have a catered corporate party at a glass shop with glassblowers as entertainment. If you want it industrial, Tacoma can put on a big show, or keep it quiet and produce 500 bongs and 3000 dildos for you in a day. Which brings me to another point:
There is one thing I’ve never liked about you.
The Northwest Glass School is known for its young, unique characters. Do a quick image search on the web, and you will see that bandana-wearing long-hairs are still quite prevalent. It took certain over-confident individuals to think they could learn thousands of years of glass techniques in a few decades. The fact that we have is a testament to our will.
In those beginning years, the late 60s and early 70s, at least ten years before these five artists were born, the Northwest was at the center of the perfect storm: a beautiful place with a strong history of craft and young, earnest hippies with a can-do attitude.
There is one thing I’ve never liked about you.
The aftermath of this storm has left behind some of the largest and most well built shops in the states, and in these shops some of the finest glassblowers have been trained. The third generation, who we are seeing right now, reaps the benefits of all these years of hard work and earnest study. Courtney Branam, Rebecca Chernow, Darin Denison, Dan Friday, and Sam McMillen represent the core of the Northwest Glass School: young, widely varied educations and backgrounds, extremely talented and incredibly driven.
--Elias Hansen, June, 2011
