Glass artist fired up over craft

• By ELLYN COUVILLION
• Advocate Ascension staff writer
• Published: Jul 2, 2009

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When he retired from teaching after 36 years, Gregory “Skip” Goldstein found that he wasn’t going to be able to golf, scuba dive or ride his motorcycle like he had planned due to health reasons.
But he found something else to do, literally in his own backyard.
At 5 a.m. most days, Goldstein can be found in the art studio he built there for his wife, where he creates artwork from glass.
“It’s my passion now,” Goldstein said.
Calling his wife, Kelly, his mentor, Goldstein has discovered his own talent in what’s call “warm glass” or “kiln-formed” glass art.
Warm-glass artists cut the shapes they want from glass, place them on a glass background, then fire the pieces up in a kiln so that the glass artwork can melt to a point where it retains its form but adheres to its glass background.
The result could perhaps be described as a three-dimensional painting in glass.
Goldstein shows and sells his work at the Downtown Arts Market in  Baton Rouge the first Saturday of every month and at the Red Hot Art Gumbo Community Market in Gonzales the third Saturday of every month.
He said people like to touch his art and feel the different glass shapes.
“If I don’t sell stuff when I’m showing, I still enjoy it. People appreciate what I do,” Goldstein said.
Kelly Goldstein took her first class in warm-glass art, an art form that isn’t well-known in this part of the country, more than 10 years ago, in Portland, Ore.
Kelly, who is also a stained-glass artist and quilter, worked for several years with warm glass in the studio that her husband built behind their Gonzales home.
“She was one of the only warm-glass artists in the South for awhile,” said Skip Goldstein, who was a special education teacher before retiring two years ago.

When Skip Goldstein decided he’d like to try his hand at it, everything was there — the kiln, the glass, the glass cutter and the glass grinder for shaping small pieces.
“I didn’t realize Skip had so much talent. He blew me away when he got out there,” said Kelly Goldstein, who has recently taken up rug quilting.
Creating warm-glass art isn’t an cheap undertaking.
A kiln can cost several thousand dollars. Sheets of colored glass, which Skip Goldstein  gets from the Bullseye Glass Co. in Portland, Ore., can cost close to $100 or more per piece.
Skip Goldstein’s own pieces might sell for anywhere from $35 to $200, he said.
“I don’t think I have anything more than $200. You can’t expect for people to pay for your artwork (according) to the time you put in,” Skip Goldstein said.
“It’s not the money,” he said of why he spends most days in the studio.
It’s something he loves doing, he said.
Skip Goldstein was working on a piece for an upcoming Downtown Arts Market in Baton Rouge.
His early pieces were of whimsical fish shapes — Goldstein once was a diving instructor and said he was also inspired by fish in the koi pond at his home.
These days, his works are folk art, based, he said, on the paintings of Clementine Hunter.
On one June morning, he was putting the final touches on a colorful scene that featured a man driving a wagon loaded with cotton.
Goldstein fired the piece in the kiln for several hours, bringing the heat up to 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, then left it in the kiln overnight.
Some pieces must be refired if Goldstein wants to reshape some of the cooled, melted glass.
His wife, he said, likens seeing the finished pieces in the kiln to getting up for gifts on Christmas morning.
“I’m Jewish, so I call it Hanukkah,” he said with a smile.
“You never know what you’re going to get; the colors change,” Goldstein said of the finished art.
“I have a hard time going to sleep at night, when I have something going in the kiln,” he said.