(upbeat music) - I'm a neon artist, so I bend glass and I fill with a noble gas inside of it.

I like to make things that are reminiscent of Aztec and Mexican indigenous cultures.

And I like to take inspiration from the area around me here in the Catskills.

So bees and trees.

And I just try to make as many things that make me happy and I hope that other people will enjoy it as well.

(upbeat music) All the neon I make is real and authentic with glass and fire and noble gas.

The current trend that is happening right now is plastic LED strips are taking over the neon name, authentic neon, it's very earth friendly and made from everything around us and it's infinitely recyclable.

(upbeat music) When applying for colleges, The School of the Art Institute was one that accepted me and offered a small scholarship, so it made it easier to make that decision.

And one of the things that really pulled me in was the fact that they had a neon class.

And I pursued that.

And the moment I tried it, I came across this new perspective of making art where everything I tried to make, I'd get into my head, but where neon, a lot of it becomes your feelings, the outside temperature, the inside temperature, the the glass itself.

It just took a lot of the inside anxiety of my mind of like trying to make everything perfect and accepting a bits of the imperfection as I'm trying to accomplish the goal that I'm making.

Bounce house blower propane.

(upbeat music) There it goes.

Authentic neon has as much science into it as much as there is art.

The artistry is in the formula of the glass.

(upbeat music) I like to describe it as it turns into a spaghetti noodle.

And then the moment you take it out of the fire, you've got a few seconds before it gets all stiff again.

And then you have to also do it in a way to where you're not heating it and cooling it off enough because it can shatter at any moment, depending on what your pattern is, sometimes you start in the middle.

Sometimes you start on step three instead of step one.

So because sometimes as you're bending, you're gonna run into yourself.

(upbeat music) The other important thing too when you're bending is to keep in mind of the diameter on the inside, 'cause again, gravity's pulling down.

So you have a little blow hose and you just push a little puff of air inside.

And that way it just expands the glass on the inside.

The science part of it is gonna be the whole bombardment process.

The part of electrifying the atoms on the inside.

And what that does is it sucks out all of the impurities, all of the air out of it, and it super heats it to vaporize everything on the inside.

So it's a sterile, complete vacuum like it would be in space.

I fill it with a noble gas inside of it.

And then once that happens, you seal it off and then you attach a transformer and you zap some electricity into it.

And the electricity is what will get the molecules inside to vibrate and react and start to create the glow from the inside.

So with clear glass, you can put neon argon, helium krypton, and xenon, neon will always be red.

If you put argon, it'll be a faint purple.

But with a drop of mercury, you get a wonderful vibrant blue.

So much of it is your understanding of like gravity, the technique, the glass, the fire.

But then the end result is this amazing natural glow, the most authentic version of light that you can accomplish, that the closest thing you can get to the sun or a campfire.

All of those photons and the lights that naturally come from a reaction neon is the closest thing you can get to it.

Neon light is essentially the Auroras borealis within a stick of glass.

It's our ability to harness the Northern Lights for ourselves.

(upbeat music) A lot of the items that I make are based in indigenous motifs from ancient Mexico.

Growing up you don't really hear much about indigenous cultures, especially in Mexico.

A lot of that was kind of suppressed in the process of assimilation, I found a little book that just showed a lot of indigenous symbols and motifs and I've just been in love with that book ever since and been wanting to grab every single item and make them into neon, 'cause each of them, I see them as they were all vibrant, at one point they were all physically available and now they're just in a tiny book forgotten.

(upbeat music) It's my hope that I can bring them back to life and put them in a new light, and that way other people can experience them.

(upbeat music)