We talked to an incredible soft glass artist named Jeff Ballard of Soft Serve Glass about his career and the challenge of bringing soft glass into the largely borosilicate-oriented industry of cannabis glass. Jeff Ballard has been working with soft glass for around twenty-five years and he's producing some of the most beautiful rigs we've ever seen, working out of a studio space that he shares with longtime friend BIGSPiN Glass. Soft Serve Glass pieces are made entirely from soft glass, a type of glass typically used in the sort of high art sculptural works and vessels created in large furnaces. Comparatively speaking soft glass can almost be considered an entirely different medium from the borosilicate glass which is more commonly used in the cannabis glass market; both are in fact glass, but the chemical compositions of these two forms demand almost a completely different set of skills and techniques to be worked, with soft glass often requiring much longer and slower annealing periods to avoid excessive thermal shock. Jeff Ballard utilizes these properties to create works that can only really be made in the soft glass medium, and this has truly set him apart from the rest of the crowd in the cannabis glass market.
Jeff Ballard stumbled into the craft of glassblowing while he was attending the University of Illinois. He wanted to study graphic design but he wasn't able to qualify for the program and was forced to choose a different major, and the glassblowing program quickly caught his eye when he was skimming a list of potential new majors. He initially thought that he would only pursue the program for one semester and that he would reapply for the graphic design major after it was over, but once he actually got some hands on experience in the glass shop he was hooked and never turned back. He could spend all day working with fire and molten glass, and the high retail value of hand blown glass art was certainly a bonus as well.
After graduating from the glassblowing program Jeff Ballard worked at three or four different studios over the next ten year period, gradually building a 'tool belt' of skills and techniques that would heavily influence his personal artistic style as he began to focus more on pursuing his own creations and ideas. As he bloomed into a serious glass artist he found inspiration in the works of Venetian glass makers, the masters of beautiful and regal design, as well as in Scandinavian art and design aesthetics, where simplicity is punctuated by an incredible eye for detail and space.
Jeff Ballard loves to play with shape, form, and color in his glass art. For many years he was known for making vessels that were centered around astonishingly realistic glass pillows, a few of those pieces are pictured above and they're made entirely from soft glass. Ballard has an incredible eye for the ways in which various materials react to their environments, whether it's a pillow with a multitude of folds and creases or an ice cream cone which is melting and oozing in the afternoon sun. His iconic ice cream cones are a testament to his artistic ability, and the mixtures of colors, patterns, and contrasting textures are exceedingly pleasant and satisfying to behold.
Jeff Ballard sells his work under the Soft Serve Glass brand, a fitting name for a glass artist who is making soft glass rigs and pipes, an industry where the convention is to use the harder and more thermal shock resistant borosilicate glass, but Ballard has clearly made a statement with the unbelievable creations that he can serve up entirely in soft glass and he leans into the unique properties of soft glass to create forms that would otherwise be difficult or nearly impossible in borosilicate. You can check out more of Jeff Ballard's gorgeous works of art over on the Soft Serve Glass Instagram page.
