Glass-blowing artist Brian Ziegler credits growing up in Burlington, Colorado, on a ranch his grandparents first homesteaded, with sparking a passion for challenging, hands-on work. “I also always had an artistic flair, and started working with watercolors, oils and ceramics while I was in school,” he said.
His family relocated to Colorado Springs when he was twelve. After graduating from high school there, Ziegler immediately started working for a construction company.
“I actually wanted to be an architect but soon realized I wasn’t meant to be behind a desk,” he said.
In 1990, Ziegler moved to Denver and worked for a wallpaper and paint company where he collaborated with contractors and designers. He absorbed the many facets of the residential construction business while honing an appreciation for color and design, just as Denver’s long-dormant housing industry began to rebound. “I had no clue back then I would ever get into glass,” he said. “It was all about making money, buying a house—all that stuff you do into your thirties.”
He soon started a construction company, primarily working in the Washington Park neighborhood and specializing in remodeling old homes, something he learned from the inside out while remodeling his own Platt Park home in 2004.
“The business just blossomed and spread word-of-mouth,” he explained. “I never once advertised and had nonstop work.”
“I realized there was no one else here catering to the public, hosting events and classes the way I wanted to. Some others offered group classes, but I wanted to target the individual. I talked with long-time friend Kurt Van Raden who was taking the glass-blowing classes with me in Fort Collins. We sat down and developed the concept for the studio together. I started with a business plan and came up with the name ‘Fire Studio’ because I’ve always loved the color red and thought, well, we are literally working with fire!”
But success came with a price.
“It was really hard on my body,” Ziegler recalled. “Knowing that the construction part was going to get more limited as I got older, I wanted to make sure I had something else I could do.”
He started mulling over learning glass blowing about ten years ago and decided to make some Christmas ornaments for family members to begin to explore the possibilities. His search for glass-blowing classes led him to Fort Collins, where he learned from glass artist Dottie Boscamp at Glass Rocks.
“She is an amazing teacher,” he said. “The first time I made a solid glass paperweight I knew I was hooked. I realized I could do this and was having great fun.”
He took classes and later rented studio space at Glass Rocks for the next four years while juggling a booming construction business.
“When the recession hit, I got really slammed,” he said. “I was a small company, and most of the larger companies went out of business. People still had money to spend but were doing more remodeling and adding on than new building, which was fantastic because the money I was making in construction paid for my glass hobby. But in the back of my mind, the driving to Fort Collins was getting a little daunting and expensive.”
With the long-range goal of finding an exit strategy from the home-building business, Ziegler began researching glass-blowing businesses in Denver.
“I realized there was no one else here catering to the public, hosting events and classes the way I wanted to,” he revealed. “Some others offered group classes, but I wanted to target the individual. I talked with long-time friend Kurt Van Raden who was taking the glass-blowing classes with me in Fort Collins. We sat down and developed the concept for the studio together. I started with a business plan and came up with the name ‘Fire Studio’ because I’ve always loved the color red and thought, well, we are literally working with fire!”
After finding a space on West Evans, the new business faced lengthy zoning hurdles.
“The city and county had never dealt with a glass-blowing company because the ones that are here were established many years ago before they were required to pull permits,” he said. “So I was very much the guinea pig. In the end, I had to pull about six permits, and it took six months to get final approval in January 2014 before we could even begin operation here.”
Exhausted by the process, Ziegler took the time to rekindle his enthusiasm.
“I was very selfish,” he continued. “I wanted to come in and be in my own space, get familiar with the studio, and not be on a time clock. I just took glass and poured it onto a table and played with it. I would never do that in someone else’s studio. Then I sat back and said, OK, it’s time to get my website up and bring people in. Once people stepped in the front door, they were like, oh, my gosh, I have to do this!”
Ziegler designed individual classes starting with a beginner’s version wherein students learn to make a paperweight, just as he first had, using the custom-made furnaces and tools, and choosing from hundreds of starter-glass colors.
“I assist, of course, but you get to make the piece all by yourself,” he said. “In the second-level class you make a Christmas ornament and classes gradually advance from there. We plan to expand our classes into fusing, which is basically taking sheets of glass that are already cut, putting them in molds and then heating it up, so it slumps down in.”
The technique is used for making objects such as glass dishes and jewelry.
Meanwhile, the artist continued to struggle to balance the demands of his hectic construction business with the task of launching Fire Studio.
“By this time construction was really taking a toll on my body—neck, wrist, back,” he said. “I just got to the point where I said; I’m done.”
He sold the company a few months ago.
“I’m absolutely thrilled now to be turning this hobby into an actual full-time business,” he said.
Besides offering an expanding teaching component, Fire Studio rents space to glass artists throughout the Western United States.
“If you do a Google search of glass blowers within Colorado’s six surrounding states, you’re not going to find a whole lot. So people from Montana and Wyoming come to Denver to use our studio. Right now Kurt Van Raden is not only our featured artist but the main renter here. A good portion of his work is with ‘memory orbs,’ which are very unique paperweights that encase the cremains of loved ones in glass. He has a full-time job elsewhere, so this is very much a part-time gig for him.”
Ziegler’s newfound ability to focus all his energy on Fire Studio has also enabled him to purchase the equipment required to craft larger pieces.
“In a sense, it’s like building a house where you’re working with both form and color and in the end, you have something great to show. It’s also a challenge beyond anything I’ve ever done. You’re working with twenty-one-hundred degrees of essentially molten lava. It feels great to concentrate on making these pieces, letting my body heal, and sharing the experience with others.”
“I specialize in making sixteen to eighteen-inch glass cherries,” he said. “Our annealing oven is only sixteen inches tall so we’re getting a new one because when we make a piece of glass, part of the challenge is that it must stay above nine-hundred-eighty degrees at all times. If it drops below that, it could crack. So we’re constantly flashing our glass, molding it, heating it up until it starts to get soft in our annealing oven [set at 980 degrees] and bringing it back out to mold.”
Fire Studio is also stepping up its community outreach with open houses that offer glass-blowing demonstrations and seasonal art objects for sale in its gallery, along with food, wine and beer. Their plans include a Dog Days of Summer Festival August 19 & 20, 5-9p.m., a Pumpkin Festival October 15, 10a.m.-5 p.m. and an Ornament Extravaganza Festival December 3, 10a.m.-5 p.m.
The Pumpkin Festival features glass pumpkins (another of Ziegler’s specialties); the Christmas Festival, a large selection of glass ornaments.
For Ziegler, glass-blowing combines both his talent for building and the innate understanding of color that first inspired him to paint as a kid.
“In a sense, it’s like building a house where you’re working with both form and color and in the end, you have something great to show,” he said. “It’s also a challenge beyond anything I’ve ever done. You’re working with twenty-one-hundred degrees of essentially molten lava. It feels great to concentrate on making these pieces, letting my body heal, and sharing the experience with others.”
For more information about Fire Studio, visit firestudiodenver.com.
Author Susan Dugan’s wide range of work includes newspaper and magazine articles, personal essays and fiction. An active volunteer in local schools, she has taught creative writing and brought authors into classrooms. If you know a member of our community who is contributing in extraordinary ways and might make a good subject for this column, email Susan at sadugan@gmail.com.
