The roar of the furnace is the first thing you might notice in a garage-like glassblowing studio at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale.
The appliance sits idle around 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit, and it gets even hotter when it’s time to work. But the temperature of the room really isn’t too bad, at least with some snow on the ground outside.
The school’s glassblower-in-residence José Chardiet is still wearing a brown canvas jacket as he prepares for an afternoon class in December of 2023.
“This time of year, it's the best time of the year to blow glass,” Chardiet said. “Super comfortable, once everything is warm.”
Chardiet is heating the furnace up before students arrive to learn about a practice not often taught in high school.
Soon, a small group of teenagers would arrive to make delicate flowers and elegant cups — something for fun, and something for function.
“Theoretically, we're supposed to be making drinking glasses for the cafeteria, … and we do that sort of thing,” Chardiet says. “But … I (also) encourage them to make artwork. And that's kind of my end of it, in my own work.”
Chardiet makes sculptural pieces, which you can see at the Raven Gallery in Aspen. His works have a whimsical, come-to-life quality that isn’t far off from the dancing tableware in “Beauty and the Beast,” and he finds inspiration in everything from a copy of “Architectural Digest” to a journey through northern Italy.
Chardiet says you can find themes in his work — family certainly is one — but he’s not necessarily trying to tell a specific story.
“It's one of the things that I really love about artmaking that you don't have to work that way,” Chardiet said. “You don't have to consciously be thinking about, ‘Okay, what is this piece about?’ You can let your mind go.”
Besides, with glass, there’s only so much that he can command, even with decades of experience.
“As you're working with the material over a long period of time you get really proficient at handling it, but still, glass is always kind of ultimately in control, the molten glass, and you can control it only to a certain point,” Chardiet says.
He says glassblowing is like a “dance.” That’s what attracted him to it way back in the 1970s, when he was introduced to the practice in college. He signed up for a class for beginners, and “that was it,” he says.
“I was hooked. I fell in love with it,” he remembers. “And, like one does when they fall in love with something like that, I spent just countless hours there.”
Chardiet went on to workshops, an MFA program and a university-level teaching career, with work featured in major national museums. He got the job at CRMS in 2020: It allows him to use the facilities there while teaching students the craft. (He also does some work at a home studio.)
Now in his late 60s, Chardiet says he still loves this medium of glassblowing because of the challenges it presents and the way it gets him into a state of complete focus.
“You have to give it all your attention when you're working on it, … and I like that,” Chardiet says. “I can't let anything else into my head.”
Chardiet says he learns a lot from the act of glassblowing and of teaching the craft — like patience, and letting go. Surely, there’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.
“If you get into the way the glass moves, and not try to fight it and kind of instill your will, or force your will onto it, it works out much better,” Chardiet says. “I mean, literally, you have to go with the flow.”
