The glory days.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

The flaming torch in his hand casts an orange sheen on Elliot Borrelli's sweaty face. The white-hot torch reflects in stereo - twin, dancing tongues of fire - in the lenses of his safety glasses. The fire's yellow flames lick around the red-hot glass he is shaping.

The molten object looks unearthly, and not just because the glowing orb resembles a gaseous planet. Could it be ... Satan? Yes, as a matter of fact: Borrelli is crafting a horned, yellow-eyed bust of Lucifer.

Nearby, John Niles works so close to the fire roaring out of his torch that his competitor identification badge is singed black. Working with both the torch and a blow tube in his mouth, he carefully fuses a curling, blue tentacle to the sea creature he is sculpting.

Further down the long table of competitors, Adam Deering rocks out to the hip-hop music only he can hear on a headset, as he wields both a torch and a thin, ice-pick-like tool to shape a colorful swirl of molten glass into an elegant vessel.

Next to him, 10-year-old Keyne Webb somehow manages to chew gum and blow glass into tiny bumblebees.

The four glass blowers were among more than 50 in town last weekend for the Eugene Glass School's Flame-Off competition, in which artistic glass blowers work before an audience and against the clock as they create pieces for a juried show.

The Flame-Off was just one part of the school's four-day Glass Renaissance Show, which also featured demonstrations by scientific glass blowers and nationally recognized glass artists. At a the event's benefit auction, a local piece fetched $7,500: "Logan's Reef," a large seascape by Alsea glass artist Marcel Braun and a team of students.

The glass school, located in a former manufacturing warehouse in the West 11th Avenue industrial district, is putting Eugene on the map in a region already noted for its glass art.

Regional fame

It may be no coincidence that the Pacific Northwest is where glass caught fire as one of the hottest art forms of the new century. After all, we live along the Cascade Range, where molten silica has long simmered just beneath the surface. Regional tourism officials are even emphasizing the connection in a new promotional package for arts-minded travelers, www.culturalcascades.com.

And it was Tacoma artist Dale Chihuly who shattered stereotypes of glass blowing as carnival booth act, as a medium for creating only a menagerie of delicate unicorns or other creatures.

Critical and popular acclaim for Chihuly's massive, muscular creations of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s helped establish glassmaking as a fine art here - as it always had been in the Italian studios where he studied.

Interest in his work also paved the way for successful glass studios springing up all along the region's Interstate 5 corridor in recent years.

The opening of the Eugene Glass School in 1998 put Eugene-Springfield on the map of Northwest cities attracting glass artists. The school, at 575 Wilson St., has now trained more than 1,000 students. The building itself may be a lucky location: Bill Bowerman's son, Tom, confirmed that his late father did some of his first experiments here with the rubber waffle soles that led to Nike shoes, back when the building was occupied by a tire company.

While Eugene Glass School offers classes in everything from beads to marbles to off-hand sculpture, it is gaining a national reputation as a pioneer in the creation of large-scale vessels on industrial glass lathes.

Cutting edge of glass art

Two years ago, trailblazing artist Mike Plane joined the school as an artist in residence, and is now its facility director.

Plane, 27, specializes in the artistic use of borosilicate, a stronger glass better known as Pyrex for its industrial and household applications. He uses its strength and versatility to create large, colorful vessels bearing no apparent resemblance to those ubiquitous white casserole dishes.

"Borosilicate is a new medium to the art world, and Mike is taking it to its limits," said Candace Moffett, a glass school board member whose Alder Gallery in downtown Coburg features Plane's work. "He is doing something genuinely new."

Last weekend, Plane demonstrated his unorthodox technique on a new, 12-foot industrial lathe specially designed for him and donated to the school by Litton Engineering Laboratory of California.

He clamped a clear, borosilicate tube into a rotor at one end of the lathe, and a handmade rod of richly colored glass into a rotor at the other end. As the rotors spun in perfect synchronization, Plane heated the glass red-hot with a prototype torch that might double as a flame-thrower. His "Python" is capable of spewing a 4-foot-long, 4-inch-wide flame.

Working with assistant Tracy Doyle, who wielded other torches to keep sections of the spinning tubes molten, Plane used angled, tong-like "jacks" to stretch open the mouth of the colored glass. Cranking a control wheel, he shortened the lathe and used a carbon paddle to coax the colored glass over the stronger, clear base.

The heat is so intense, he and Doyle must don reflective aluminized suits and welder's visors. Spectators, wearing sunglasses even indoors and at night because of the super-bright torch, could feel the heat 20 feet away.

For all the equipment, however, Plane is still a glassblower, and the "wind" portion of the craft's earth-wind-fire equation still comes from his own lungs.

As the giant lathe spun and the torch roared, he gently blew into tubing hanging from the side of his mouth to create negative space inside the three-foot vessel he was creating.

Plane's technique is to introduce color after color, fusing the sections together, to create large, decorative objects often embellished with the textures and motifs of Africa, where his parents lived when he was born.

The scientific lathe is also being used by other Eugene Glass School artists to blow unusually large objects, said George Kjaer, a retired local psychiatrist and president of the school's board of directors.

How large?

"Just for a lark, somebody made a beach ball 3 feet in diameter," he said.

Several artists at the school took the realistically colored creation to the beach, tossing it among themselves. But the ball shattered after an unsuspecting passer-by, expecting nearly weightless plastic, dropped the surprisingly heavy object.

Classic, scientific glass also hot

Furnaces that reach 2,100 degrees provide plenty of opportunities for students to learn classical, off-hand glass-blowing techniques, where the heat comes not from torches but from repeatedly plunging the work into the orange-hot heart of a roaring "glory hole."

Artist Charlie Lowery, who divides his time between Hawaii, Oregon and Italy, captivated a large crowd during last weekend's show as he worked with four assistants to create a realistically detailed, 3-foot gray whale.

The weekend also included demonstrations by scientific glass blowers, including Wade Martindale of Farlow's Scientific Glassblowing in Nevada City, Calif. He blows clear borosilicate to create anatomically correct circulatory system models. In his Eugene demonstration, he showed how he creates glass heart models used by doctors to study and explain medical procedures.

In an interview, Martindale also described how he uses glass blowing to replicate even the tiniest blood vessels in the brain. Using measurements based on castings from the veins of cadavers, Martindale can craft glass vessels whose interior capacity is accurate to within 5/100,000ths of an inch of its human counterpart.

Scientific glass blowers are among the most enthusiastic fans of the renewed interest in glass art, he added.

"They used to be two different worlds," he said. "Now the two worlds are moving closer together. We both want to learn everything there is to know about the medium."

Karen McCowan can be reached at 338-2422 or [e-mail].

EUGENE GLASS SCHOOL

Address: 575 Wilson Street

Gallery hours: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday

Classes: Workshops and weekly sessions for beginners through advanced glassmakers

Contact information: www.eugeneglassschool.org or 342-2959

EUGENE GLASS SCHOOL GOBLET COMPETITION

Where: Alder Gallery, dowtown Coburg

Gallery hours: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Contact information: www.alderart.com or 342-6411

CAPTION(S):

The delicate details of a scorpion fish take shape during the Flame-Off, where artists created pieces before an audience to enter in a competition.