Glassblowing brings the fire to Sonoma’s Art Escape

Humans have been blowing glass for more than 2,000 years, and here in the Valley, interested artists can test out the ancient medium right in their own backyard.

Alex Leader, who has more than three decades of experience in the fire-born art, offers regular classes at Art Escape, a local art school and creative sanctuary. After he was tapped to teach in 2019, he told Art Escape he would need a furnace; they came up with the money to do it a week later.

Leader was first exposed to the art while attending college in New Hampshire. He took a road trip the next summer to California and met a man who ran a glassblowing shop at the edge of a grove of redwood trees near the famed Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt, California.

That was it — he dropped out of college, moved back to New Jersey, and found a job at a glassblowing shop, where he worked for five years before moving to Sonoma after accepting a job at Bacchus Glass. He’s been here ever since, including seven years of running his own shop, Leaderglass, on Eighth Street East.

“I fell in love with the process of glassblowing,” Leader said. “I think everybody should try it because it will take you out of your comfort zone a little lit, but you’ll get to experience working with a material that people have been making the same way for thousands of years.”

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, glassblowing was invented by Syrian craftsmen in the area of Sidon, Aleppo, Hama and Palmyra in the first century B.C.

Leader’s passion for glassblowing stems from its process and movement, which he compares to honey, once the material is properly heated and ready to manipulate.

“Glass in its molten state — it has to be heated around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for it to be molten — moves like water in that it drips if you stop turning it,” Leader said. “It’s a solid that acts like a liquid.”

A quick flip of his fingers is required to shape the glass, which can be pulled like taffy and twirled to make any number of shapes and designs.

His connection to glassblowing lives through his teaching, which he also offered when he ran his own shop. In his years, he has taught more than 1,000 people the art form, Leader estimates.

His regular drop-in class is open to people as young as 12 years old; he said teenagers usually catch on quicker and tend to take to the craft better than adults.

Leader actually prefers to call the class a “glass experience” because he helps out a lot during the process, and, for most people who come, it’s the only time they will ever get to experiment with the medium.

“I call it a glass experience, because most people will not continue with it,” Leader said. “Most people will try it out, get a feeling of what glass blowing is, and that’s it.”

Requiring a lot of technical knowledge and skill, not to mention strength, it is not a medium that is easy or quick to master. Because of the hot fire and molten glass, there is a steep learning curve.

“Everyone who comes to my class is a beginner,” he continued. “It takes, like, three years of glassblowing full-time to get past the beginner stage.”

Though most people only come once, they get to leave with a cup and flower they make during their time with the glass, as long as they don’t break it.

Contact the reporter Rebecca Wolff at rebecca.wolff@sonomanews.com.