We talked to legendary glass artist Hugh Glass about his extensive career in cannabis glass and how the craft has changed over the last thirty years since Hugh first started blowing. Hugh Glass is a true veteran of the cannabis glass industry, having started in 1990 as a student and friend of cannabis glass pioneer Bob Snodgrass, the inventor of the gold and silver fuming techniques used to make color-changing pipes throughout the 90's and on through today. Back in 1990 Hugh was a regular attendee at Grateful Dead shows along with Bob Snodgrass, and Hugh was looking for a way to earn money and keep himself out of trouble in the process. Snodgrass would do live glassblowing demos in the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows so Hugh took an interest in the craft and Bob Snodgrass took him under his wing and began to teach him how to blow glass. It was around this time that Hugh Glass recommended that Snodgrass should check out the Eugene, Oregon region and Bob fell in love with the area and community, making Eugene his permanent home base and starting a local glassblowing community that has become world famous for producing some of the best and brightest glass artists in the United States.
Hugh Glass was Bob Snodgrass' first true apprentice, and Hugh hasn't had any mentors outside of his relationship with Bob Snodgrass. By 1991 Hugh's skills had grown to the point that Snodgrass gave Hugh his blessing to begin selling his solo works, and Hugh started his brand 'Hugh Glass.' It's interesting to note that in the 90s and early 2000s cannabis glass artists were hesitant to attach their real names to their work. Bob Snodgrass and Hugh Glass were unique in this sense because by the time the DEA's Operation Pipe Dreams occurred in the early 2000's Snodgrass and Hugh had already become household names in the industry. Other cannabis glass artists stopped using their real names following the DEA's undercover stings, but Hugh Glass and Snodgrass and other early artists continued using their names in association with their works despite the growing paranoia surrounding the cannabis glass industry, and by the mid-2000's much of that paranoia had died out and more artists began attaching their names to their works again. Hugh always felt that 'Hugh Glass' was enough of an alias to separate his legal identity from his less-than-legal craft, so he never deviated from that brand name throughout his entire career.
When Hugh Glass started working solo in 1991 there weren't a lot of choices for glass colors to use in pipe making. Northstar Glassworks had just started offering their initial palette of colors, but according to Hugh only about ten of those colors were actually workable. The others would boil or turn to foam too easily to make durable glass products. Hugh Glass may be one of the only people who is still in possession of some of these early 90s Northstar Glassworks colors because he still has bundles of colored rods that he never liked to use but hasn't given away. Occasionally he will give a rod or two of early Northstar color to a glassblower just to see if they can work with it, but they always come back and tell him that the color just wasn't workable. Over the years the palette of glass colors available to artists has grown exponentially, and especially in the last five years there has been a huge explosion of new glass colors in shades that early glassblowers like Hugh Glass would have never thought possible. "We finally have a good purple now," Hugh said, remarking on the longtime absence of vibrant purple shades from the glass color palette. Glassblowers in the 1990s and 2000s would experiment to find ways to achieve the colors that they wanted, and it was this experimentation that led Bob Snodgrass to invent his metal fuming deposition technique. Hugh Glass found that he could achieve a nice purple by laying Extra Light Yellow over Ruby Red, and he was constantly experimenting with combinations like these when the selection of glass colors was more limited. Now glass artists have a limitless world of color at their disposal, something that Hugh Glass is utilizing to full effect in his work today.
Around the year 2000, Hugh Glass heard about the opening of the Eugene Glass School, and he acquired a position as a teacher's assistant to Jason Harris, another of Bob Snodgrass' apprentices who later adopted the name Jerome Baker and started the world-famous Jerome Baker Designs. In his role as a teacher's assistant Hugh Glass was able to teach students and learn new techniques alongside them, as well as affirming his own knowledge through repetition and instruction. Over time Hugh was given leadership over the Eugene Glass School's flameworking program, and in 2003 he organized the first Eugene Glass School Flame Off, also known as the EGS Flame Off. The Flame Off grew from a small event in the Eugene community to a competition attended by glassblowers from all over the country, and as the competition has grown so have the prizes. Hugh Glass has been organizing the EGS Flame Off throughout all of it. An impressive addition to an already impressive resume in the cannabis glass industry.
Hugh Glass' pieces are typically made using signature forms that Hugh has perfected over the years. He doesn't follow the latest trends in the glassblowing industry, preferring instead to do variations on the signature shapes and forms for which he is known. His Hugh Hammers are an iconic hammer pipe made with complex fuming patterns and Hugh commonly works tessellated patterns of skulls into his pieces. His use of color and metal fuming is wholly unique in the industry, and is often emulated by other artists. These days Hugh Glass wants to focus on collaborating with as many artists as he can, deriving more satisfaction from the process of working with other artists than from the finished product. In his free time Hugh is passionate about mushroom hunting, he is really able to relax when he's walking in the woods spotting chanterelles or boletes, and there's a robust mushroom hunting community in Oregon to supplement this passion. Even though he's been working glass for more than thirty years Hugh Glass still has the same level of love and passion for his craft, and his single favorite thing to do is to get stoned and sit down at his torch and start melting some glass. In the future he intends to continue working just as he has, and finding more and more artists to collaborate with. You can check out more of Hugh's iconic work over on the Hugh Glass Instagram page.
