A FIELD TRIP TO FIREART

I’ve been making myself cranky with my endless COE rant. It’s times like these when a trip out to visit Ray Ahlgren helps to clear my head – and reminds me what world class obsessiveness really looks like.

You may remember Ray from my first blog entry. He’s the one on the far left in the photo of The Crew at the start of Bullseye. He’s also on the left in the Inner Hippy episode.

Former college buddies, long-ago studio partners, now two of Portland’s resident Old Glass Farts, Ray and Dan can still talk kilnforming to death – this Saturday morning the subject was a cast Tlingit shield form Ray had cast for Seattle artist Preston Singletary.


One of Bullseye’s original three founders, Ray left the company in 1981. Today he’s the owner/operator of Fireart, a studio that I consider at the leading edge of 21st century kilnformed glass. When you first drive up to the tiny converted wood-frame house in a leafy Portland neighborhood “world class” isn’t exactly the term that springs to mind. “Pack rat” comes closer.

The Evidence is everywhere. Slumping molds on one rooftop.

Slumped glass shades on another.

In the backyard there are 5-foot diameter glass rims hand-cut from some of the shades - single unbroken circles, testimony to some of the best glass cutting skills you’ll find anywhere on earth. Note the rust-colored form at the center of the previous shot; its about 3’ in diameter. The rim that was trimmed from it – by hand - is the smaller one in this shot:

An almost impeccably cast glass slab – save one protruding corner where the dams gave way during firing – leans up against the same garden wall, reminding us that we’re all playing with liquid fire. Ray’s studio yard combines the technical detritus of the mad scientist with the aesthetic of a West Texas salvage yard.

Inside, it’s an ode to verticality.

In a space this small, stacking becomes its own art form. Ray and his crew of three slump, store and package thousands of square feet of glass shades in what was once a tiny two-bedroom home.

And speaking of stacking…up on the ceiling, yes, it’s a kiln ring. Normally stored out of the way overhead, when needed, it can be added to the kiln in the background to nearly double its height.

Somewhere between the seeming chaos and the mind-boggling order lies the genius of Ray Ahlgren. I’ve never been really sure whether he’s happier when things go right or when things go wrong. He can wax euphoric about a job to make 86 enormous identical glass shades to excruciatingly precise tolerances, then turn around and revel in figuring out a technical problem that may only ever have a single application for a single artist doing a single project.

(Incidentally, Ray is so fanatical about precise replication, that when he went to make kids, he created two astoundingly beautiful, identical twins.)

Ray works with a number of artists in his own studio to help them execute their designs in glass. Occasionally he comes back to consult with the R&E team at Bullseye, as he did on a series of bas relief castings with Mexican artist Rafael Cauduro.

So why do I enjoy these rare field trips to Ray’s so much? I guess I like to think that as one of Bullseye’s founders, Ray left behind some very special DNA. His fanatical commitment to precision, to problem-solving, to finding the ultimate solution to glass problems is inspirational to all of us at Bullseye still today. When I think that my own harping on the picayune details of compatibility is insane and obsessive, I like to conjure up an image of Ray railing on about tolerances measured in millimeters and thermocouples calibrated with every firing. For me, that’s a pretty special Saturday morning.

Now that you’ve seen the underbelly of Fireart, take a look at their website for some really remarkable projects in kiln-glass.

And for those of you who’ve signed up for the Studio Tour during BECon, lucky you. I guarantee that your visit to Ray’s will be unlike any other in your experience of kilnformed glass.