Glass-blowing artist finds Missoula niche

With a steady hand and a trained eye, Andy McNaught holds a small piece of glass tubing in the fiery path of a propane-oxygen torch.

As the glass begins to heat, art begins to form.

Bennett Jacobs
For the Kaimin

http://www.kaimin.org/test2.php?ardate=20040212&id=2459

McNaught, 27, has been a glass-blowing entrepreneur for nearly six years and is now a full-time university student getting straight A’s, using the former to pay for the latter.

Although a good portion of the glass he sells ends up being used for less than legal activities, McNaught is quick to point out that he thinks of himself as an artist and that he makes and sells lots of other things besides pipes and bongs.

“Glass blowing is not a crime,” McNaught said. “My business focuses mainly on custom work. Some of it is legitimate artwork, some of it isn’t. I make what people want to pay me for.”

Since he moved to Missoula in 2000, specifically for the potential glass market, McNaught has in varying capacities operated Third Eye Glass, originally with three friends and now on his own. McNaught makes and sells blown glass pieces ranging from goblets and perfume bottles to pipes and bongs, not only in Missoula, but around the country.

“I found glass, then I got sick of glass and then I found UM,” said McNaught, a junior in recreation management.

Since the New York native returned to school last semester, his business has slowed down a bit. The stress and amount of labor that goes into managing his own business became too much to maintain once he started classes, McNaught said. Now he works another job at Perugia’s restaurant part-time and fills glass orders whenever he can.

One of the local businesses that McNaught still fills orders for is Rainbow’s End, located in downtown Missoula, and its downstairs sister, the Down Under.

“It’s one of the staple things we sell here,” said Aimee McQuilkin, manager of Rainbow’s End. “People know his stuff and expect it.”

Another local store McNaught does business with is Ear Candy Music.

“Andy is a cool guy, a great glassblower and a hell of a great guy to do business with,” said Chris Henry, co-owner of Ear Candy.

McNaught thinks one of the things that makes his pieces so sought-after is his skill in a technique called montage, in which small lines of colored glass are melted and twisted into a larger piece of clear glass.

McNaught grew up near Corning, N.Y., the self-proclaimed glass capitol of the United States. It was in 1998 in Corning that McNaught was first exposed to glass blowing, and he soon got a job laboring for a gaffer, or professional glassblower. Before long he became an apprentice and was learning advanced glassblowing skills.

Much of his training is in traditional Venusian glassblowing, where the blower uses a long tube to blow into a blob of molten glass to form an evenly thin-walled bubble. This is the hardest kind of glassblowing, he explained. It requires special equipment that McNaught can’t always access.

Instead, most of the work he does today is in what is known as a torch studio. Tucked away in a room of a friend’s garage, McNaught’s studio consists of a torch, a kiln capable of producing temperatures in excess of 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit and a hoard of shaping and cutting tools.

McNaught says in the future he wants to continue to blow glass as a hobby and to supplement his income, but doesn’t want to do it full-time again.

“I don’t want to have to depend on a sale,” McNaught said. “That takes all the fun out of it.”