The Art of Ed Pennebaker
@story MARLA CANTRELL
@images ED PENNEBAKER

In a backwoods studio in Osage, Arkansas, long before the sun rises, glass blower Ed Pennebaker mixes one-hundred-twenty pounds of silica, potash, lime and cobalt oxide.  When he’s finished, he puts the compound into a four-by-four cube of a furnace he built himself.  In the afternoon, he cranks the temperature up to 2,350 degrees, the heat ferocious in the small space.  It is hot hard work, and it takes its toll on the fifty-five-year-old.  Still, Ed can’t imagine a life without the fire blazing, the glass melting and a stack of projects waiting to be completed. 

This is life he’s always wanted.

The following day, when the furnace is churning at a tamer 2,100 degrees, Ed slides open a tiny door, pulls a small amount of the liquid glass out with a five-foot stainless steel pipe, then dips it into a gear-shaped mold that adds the ribbed texture he’s looking for. “It looks kind of like a ball of taffy at this point,” Ed says, describing the glass that glows white in its molten state.  The process alternates: he blows the glass, shapes it at a bench where he rolls it back and forth, and then blows it again.  He is all muscle and sinew, compact and efficient.  He is dressed in cotton – synthetics are too flammable – and as he works his safety glasses catch the light, casting it out into the room. 

It will take him another four days to work through the rest of the one-hundred-and-twenty pounds of blue glass.  When he’s finished he will have two-hundred pieces to be used in future projects.

There is something about glass, the way the light dances through it, the way it seems to move while standing still, that’s fascinated Ed for years.  He’s best known for his chandeliers – he’s made 550 so far -- but he also creates sculptures, some small enough to hold in your hand, part metal, part glass, and all absolutely captivating.

The recurrent theme in his work is nature.  It’s why his studio, Red Fern Glass, is in the woods, and it’s what motivates him to keep creating.  “I live on the side of a mountain.  ..I’m about twenty miles from a town of any size.  ..Seed pods and flower buds change every day.  Everything cycles through the seasons.  My interpretation of nature is abstract, but the connection is there.”

Ed’s talent surfaced early, when he was still a boy in southwest Kansas.  “I drew a lot when I was really young.  ..In high school, my painting called “Honeycomb Spectrum” won an award.  It was actually more of a design idea, like a record cover, and it had a bunch of hexagons with all different colors.”

He majored in art, with a primary focus in silk screen printing.  He liked the way the ink looked on the paper, the flatness of it, the beauty of a work without any modulation.  From there he became an artist-in-residence in Liberal, Kansas.  And that’s when he was introduced to glass.  “The process is so intense,” Ed says.  “You have to concentrate, you have to be very coordinated.  ..The hardest part is controlling the glass.  It’s liquid and it’s moving all the time.”  The art is so difficult, in fact, that it weeds out all but the most dedicated.  “There are only six or seven artists blowing glass in Arkansas right now,” Ed says.

But Ed loves the challenge.  His chandeliers, which take about a week to assemble once the glass is formed, are frenetically beautiful.  The process is a lot like hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree.  Each piece is numbered.  Ed starts at the lowest point on the metal frame and works up.  As he adds the glass, the fixtures take on life.  They seem to be in motion – spirals swirling, spikes extended, globes filling in every gap.  Once lit, they glow, the blues like the ocean, the ambers rich as an Ozark autumn.  “There isn’t one particular kind of customer,” Ed says.  “I’ve made them for ranch houses, and one for the foyer of a 5 million dollar house in Long Island.  That one was a seven-foot chandelier.”

When asked why he’s been so successful, Ed downplays his talent.  “I think a lot of it has been that I can balance the business with the art.  If you’re too independent and want to do just what you want to do, it can be hard.  But if you allow yourself to do commissions and let people have a say in what they want, you can work it out. ..I do my creative work in the morning, when I’m fresh, and the run the business end in the afternoons.”

It’s a system that’s worked for him.  He lives the life he wants, surrounded by art he’s collected over the years.  “I’ve traded work with artists I admire for a long time now.  Art gives you a personal connection to the person who created it.  It’s good to live with that,” Ed says, and then rubs his thumb and forefinger across his untamed beard.   “It’s good to know other people are creating beautiful things.”

As for the future, Ed wants to focus more on sculpture.  The chandeliers, some of which are now in Brazil, Portugal, and Saudi Arabia, put Ed on the map.  And he will continue to make them, although he does plan to scale back.  “A lot of other glass blowers, probably struggling through this economy, have jumped on the functional art band wagon and gotten away from sculpture.  ..I’m the opposite.  I need to do more sculpture, combining glass with steel and limestone and cast bronze, which will have a lot of me in it.  I think it’s important to do that.”

And so his course is set.  What won’t change is the glass.  “I’ll blow glass for as long as I can. “Glass, to me, is a magical substance.  It’s translucent.  It looks liquid but it’s solid, kind of like ice,” Ed says, growing philosophical over the art that’s shaped his life. ..”I never forget how lucky I’ve been to be able to make it a living working with it.”