(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - My interest in glass-blowing is unique to glass in the fact that it can go from these vivid, bright, opaque colors, to beautiful jewel-toned, transparent colors.

And the fact that it's transparent, you can add great depth to the work, things that you can't do necessarily in some other art forms.

So it just has that breadth of expression that you can utilize and it's fairly immediate.

Anything like a wine glass I make today is available tomorrow.

My name is John Olesen.

I am an artist focusing in glass, and we are at a White Pine Studios.

We're in South Central Otter Tail County.

White Pine Studio has been here since 2002.

My work consists of two different aspects of glass art, where I mainly focus on wholesale work, selling to galleries, and that consists of vases, bowls, and a lot of stemware, a lot of wine glasses, martini glasses, other high-end drinkware.

That's kind of the bread and butter of what I do.

And I also work in commission work, where I'll do specialty pieces for walls and people's homes.

Done some public art.

So all glass-blowing starts with a blow pipe.

And the blow pipe needs to be preheated.

If it's not hot enough, the glass won't stick to it properly, it'll pop and crack.

The glass is coming outta here at 2100 degrees, give or take 50 degrees, not to gather glass.

I got started by going to college, Anoka-Ramsey.

And when I found out they had glass blowing, it was like, "Well, I would like to try that.

That looks like fun.

That's something I could get into."

And Anoka-Ramsey was a two-year college, so I wanted to go back to school to work on an art degree.

So I started attending University of Minnesota to work on an art degree.

I moved up here in 2002 to build White Pine Studio.

This process is called marvering.

I believe, or have been told that marver is Italian for marble.

And in the olden days, it was a piece of marble rather than a piece of steel.

This is little bits of color called frit.

This flower bowl is gonna be a red and blue and pink.

Having blown glass for over 40 years, and learning in the early years, the craft of glass-blowing, learning how to make the objects and shapes that I need to make or wanted to make, and then going back to school later on, I learned more of the art side of things.

The ability to throw some ideas against the wall and see what sticks.

Making the same thing over and over again, trying to make it a little bit different, but within constraints of a wine glass, or a martini glass, or a bowl.

After making lots of those pieces, then going back and assessing what parts of it worked, and what parts didn't.

And those are my inputs into them.

That is my interpretation of it.

And then my deciding what I want to include, and how I want to match those things up into a final product.

So this is the start of the layering process of color for this bowl.

Most of the color is gonna be focused on the bottom, middle of the bowl.

So we'll add color and then we'll get more glass, and add more color, more design to it, and then start inflating those gathers of glass to create a bubble.

We'll add vines to the outside of it and those will be added as a bit of glass that'll get trailed onto there.

That organic, natural sort of design to it.

(gentle music) I think for beginners, the biggest challenge for glass-blowing is the fact that it always needs to be moving.

The punty is always turning.

There isn't an opportunity to really stop and look at what you're doing.

The glass, you can't stop it.

If it gets too cold, it'll break.

If it's so hot, it'll fall off center.

If it gets off center, that's a problem for the whole piece.

After three-quarters of the piece is done, then we'll punty it, the piece, which is applying solid rod with a bit of glass on it to the bottom of the piece, breaking it off of the blow pipe, and then we'll start working on the top and opening it up and doing that finished part.

(gentle music) So that's where we'll see those first bits of color that we put in there.

Although when we're doing it, they're gonna look all the same color, they're all gonna be orange, or they're all gonna be black.

We won't see the true colors until it cools down the next day.

(gentle music) The reasons I make what I make, I like the pieces that people are gonna use.

I like the stemware and barware type things, because I envision people using it and enjoying it.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.