Thursday, February 12, 2009
By Carl Hoover
Tribune-Herald entertainment editor
Temple glassblower Bob Rynearson helped out a shorthanded Santa Fe glass studio more than a decade ago and confesses he “got bit by the glass bug bad” by the experience.
Since then, more than a thousand Temple-area residents have gotten nipped as well in Rynearson’s Ryno Glass shop, blowing their own Christmas ornaments, glass pumpkins and Easter eggs over the 2,200-degree “glory hole,” a small reheating furnace where glass melts on its way to becoming colorful, fluidly shaped art.
Exhibit: Through March 20 at Art Center Waco, 1300 College Drive. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays.
Admission: Suggested $2 donation for adults.
Art Center Waco visitors can see the much cooler final products of the glassblower’s hot work in “The Art of Glass,” an exhibit of about 75 bowls, vases and molded plates the 39-year-old Rynearson has made over the last six years.
Waco’s familiar territory for the glassblower. His wife, Kim, is the director of Tarleton State University’s Waco Outreach Programs, and their two children attend Live Oak Classical School.
Since 2000, the former tennis instructor has run a glass shop in Temple, starting in his father’s backyard sculpture studio before moving into a renovated downtown building. Although he intended to create warehouse glass — the artistic bowls, vases, wall platters and sculptures that hotel and corporate decorators buy for new buildings — he’s found enough business through custom pieces and retail sales.
Rynearson, who graduated Temple High School in 1988 after four years at Waco’s Vanguard School, spent months hiking through Alaska and New Zealand after high school and admits it was hard to settle down. In art glass, the free-spirited artist with ice-blue eyes discovered a medium that is colorful, unpredictable and ever varied. “I’ve always enjoyed playing with color,” he said.
To get the bright swirls of red, yellow, purple, orange and white in his work, Rynearson melts a blob of clear glass at the end of a long blow pipe. He blows the molten glass into a bulb or cylinder, rolls it in glass beads or powdered metal to add color, then remelts the glass.
Long metal fingers cool the glass when it’s blown against them, creating folds and ripples for his open bowls. Tweezers pinch and pull colors from one part of a piece of molten glass to elsewhere on its surface, adding filaments and swirls to his designs.
Rynearson and his co-workers must work fast while the glass is malleable, and the intense heat needed to melt it makes the work physically challenging, particularly in a Texas summer. “I’ve had chills in 100-degree weather — it’s still cooler outside than in the shop,” he said.
Those wanting a little warmth for Valentine’s Day can visit his studio, 110 N. Main St., after 6 p.m. Friday to blow their own hearts and flowers at a studio Open House, he said.
choover@wacotrib.com
757-5749
Exhibit: Through March 20 at Art Center Waco, 1300 College Drive. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays.
Admission: Suggested $2 donation for adults.
Works by Waco-raised artist Evelyn Gay Dreyer stretch their two display spaces at Art Center Waco with their diversity: sandstone sculpture, wood carving, etching, watercolor, stained glass, drawing and plaster of Paris sculpture.
“She could do anything, but she loved sculpture first and foremost,” recalled Carol Crosthwait, her daughter and a Waco artist herself.
“Evelyn Gay: A Retrospective” offers a cross-section of artworks by the sculpture and art educator. Born in 1915 in Christianburg, Va., her career spanned a Waco childhood; studies at New York’s Art Students League; an apprenticeship with sculptor William Zorach; and teaching positions at Baylor University, in New York City, in Westport, Conn., and at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., before her retirement in 1980.
She returned to Waco in 1992 after the death of her husband, Wallace Dreyer. She died in 1995.
The Art Center Waco show is drawn largely from Crosthwait’s personal collection and the center’s Sculpture Garden.
The retrospective offers bits of Waco history and artist personality. Dreyer repaired broken stained glass windows for St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and used scraps from those repairs to create the stained glass window in the Small Gallery, said Crosthwait. The etching “The Crane Flies Home” was a study for “Faustus,” directed by famed Baylor University theater director Paul Baker, and the subject of “Little Carol,” a sandstone sculpture of a small girl, was Crosthwait at age 5.
Dreyer was active in arts circles and discussion throughout her life. She wrote pieces on the arts for the Waco News-Tribune and participated in the Waco Forum; served as co-director of Austin’s Laguna Gloria art museum in 1962; and, at the age of 69, carved the mahogany “Adam and Eve” that stands in the Art Center Waco’s main gallery.
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