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Vessels Highlight Artisans' Skill
Patience, care went into creating 17 goblets for auction Friday
By KATHY A. GOOLSBY / The Dallas Morning News
Wineglasses abound at Grape- Fest, but none are as
unique as the 17 goblets being offered at Friday evening's auction.
Artists David Gappa and Gary Hayes created the
jewel-toned vessels for this year's event. It took three months and
many rejected pieces for the owners of Vetro Art Glass, at 334 S.
Barton St. in Grapevine, to produce the works.
"We literally had a month of losses," said Mr. Gappa,
30.
"Some of the designs are so complicated, we had a
dozen losses on each one," said Mr. Hayes, 48.
Festival organizers commissioned the 17 goblets to
commemorate the 17th annual GrapeFest, said Michael Woody,
Grapevine's director of marketing. There are eight pairs of goblets,
each representing a specific style of wineglass, and a chalice
designed with the help of the Rev. Ken Robinson at St. Francis
Catholic Church in Grapevine.
"The chalice is dramatized, so it's quite a bit
larger than the goblets, and it was used for the blessing of the
vines that we had in April," said Mr. Woody. "The neat thing is this
project allowed us to play off the focus of the event, which is
wine, and at the same time highlight one of our city's artisans."
Festival organizers provided samples of eight
standard wineglasses. The bowl shapes had been determined by Riedel,
an Austrian company that has been making glassware for more than 300
years. It was up to Vetro's artists to interpret those shapes and
decide on color combinations.
Most glass blowers work alone, but Mr. Gappa and Mr.
Hayes work together on every piece from design to finished product.
The goblets began as chalk drawings on their shop's concrete floor.
"I think the most important tool we have with our
design work is that piece of chalk," said Mr. Hayes, an
environmental manager who lives in Grapevine. "We erase and redesign
as we work on different parts of each one until we're happy with
it."
They then used metal rods to dip molten glass from
their shop's furnace, which burns continually at around 2,100
degrees. The glass was shaped in a smaller oven with colors overlaid
and the stems produced in tandem with the bowls.
"Some people use glass glue to attach the stems to
the bowls, but we make them in one solid piece," said Mr. Gappa, a
Fort Worth architect.
Making the goblets was particularly difficult, they
said, because the bowls that hold the wine are so thin. The thinner
the glass, the quicker it cools when removed from the oven for
shaping.
With the goblets, they had about 10 seconds to work
with the heated glass before it had to be returned to the furnace
for another 30 seconds.
"It was a constant dance of heating it, working with
it and heating it again," said Mr. Gappa. "Goblets are by far the
most technically and aesthetically challenging piece of glass
because by nature the bowls have to be paper thin, and we can only
work outside the oven for short periods."
Each pair of goblets features identical colors and
bowls but different stem designs, making all 16 unique. The artists
mixed and matched the jewel tones: purple with green, blue and
yellow, yellow and clear.
The city paid a nominal fee for the works, which will
be auctioned in pairs. The chalice will be offered to Mr. Robinson,
who will use it at 11 a.m. Thursday to bless the grapes at the start
of GrapeFest.
"Bidding will start at $250 per pair, and whoever
wins the first round will be given the option of buying as many
pairs as they want at that price," said Mr. Woody. "We know of
someone who will have a bidding representative there, and someone
else has told us they'll be bidding, so we're hopeful we'll raise a
lot of money."
Proceeds from the auction will benefit the Grapevine
Heritage Foundation and the Texas Wine and Grape Growers
Association. It will be from 6:30 to 11:30 p.m. Friday in the
Lancaster Theatre, 300 S. Main St.
This story also appears in the Denton County Morning
News.
E-mail
kgoolsby@dallasnews.com
or call 817-865-4959.
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