FORT WORTH STAR TELEGRAM
By Cathy Frisinger
“I’ll swing the door open, and you can see what Hades looks like,” says David Gappa as he opens the portal to a furnace.
The heat is, indeed, furious enough, and the light intense enough to make a visitor step back, much like a newly deceased sinner might recoil at hell’s entrance.
It’s an apt little verbal jest, and one that Gappa, owner of Vetro Glass in Grapevine’s historic downtown area, has no doubt made hundreds of times. For as much as Gappa was answering a call to his artistic soul when he scrapped a career designing buildings to become a glass blower, so he was answering a call to spread the word about glass blowing when he opened his working studio to the public.
Gappa, 36, got fired up about glass when he took a glass-blowing class as an elective while working on a master’s degree in architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington. He says he found molten glass “seductive” and the combination of physical, mental and artistic challenge to be unbeatable.
After his wife kicked his glassmaking out of the garage, Gappa opened a studio in a small space in Grapevine. As the business grew, he thought about leaving for quarters in Fort Worth or Dallas, but the tourism folks at the city of Grapevine had another idea: They urged Gappa to move to a larger space in the Heritage Complex, beside the city’s Historic Railroad District, and to allow tourists to drop in and watch the glass-blowing process, making the demonstrations as much a part of the business as the products.
Gappa liked the idea of involving an audience. He designed a studio that he believes “surrounds the public in glass.” As guests step into the studio, they see walls of vases, flowers, rondels and abstract works produced by Vetro artists and by other artists on display. Overhead is a large installation titled Elysian Shadows that was originally created for a Fort Worth gallery. But up front is where the show is. Rows of bleachers can hold as many as 40 people who can watch as Gappa’s staff goes about the fascinating and slightly scary business of shaping molten glass. The glass blowers narrate as they proceed, talking about the 2,000-plus-degree temperatures of the furnaces, explaining how color is added (chromium for yellow, cobalt for blue, gold and copper for red), demonstrating how the “bubble” is put in and the shaping done, and describing the cooling process, which takes an entire day and must be carefully controlled or the glass will fracture.
“These tools we use are the same tools that have been used for centuries,” Gappa tells an audience. “A glass blower from the 16th century could come into the studio and he’d know exactly what to do.”
It hasn’t always been this way with glass blowers. They haven’t always been open about their craft. Many still aren’t, in fact.
“Glass is such a mysterious and underground sort of medium,” says Gappa. “It is a cloistered trade. The reason Murano [Italy] developed — it’s an island — besides worry about fire, was to protect the trade secrets. If they left the island, they would be executed.
“That mentality remains in Italy,” says Gappa. “I wanted to break that.”
It’s a move that has worked out well for both Vetro and Grapevine. The tourists, individuals and groups, that come to the Main Street Grapevine area buy little things from Vetro — glass flowers, oil lamps, small vases — which range in price from about $10 to $100. Vetro, in turn, makes a visit to Grapevine more exciting than a simple shopping trip.
“It adds an arts component that we were missing,” says George Kakos, assistant executive director for the Grapevine Convention and Visitors Bureau. “You actually get to see how that art is put together. To some extent it’s interactive, you don’t get to blow that glass, but you are part of the experience.”
It would be incorrect, however, to imply that the tourist trade is all, or even most of what there is to Vetro. Gappa, whom a staff member describes as a workaholic, takes his art seriously, and that means creating large vessels and high-end sculptural pieces, ranging from about $250-$1,000, for collectors, as well as commissioned installations for places like a cancer-care-facility chapel in Fort Worth and a condominium development in North Carolina. Installations can run as high as $12,000. He’s working on a bid for an installation at a private palace in Saudi Arabia.
The ponytailed Gappa, who says on his Web site that he “seeks the Spirit of God” in his art, recently won the best in theme award in a juried art festival sponsored by a Presbyterian group. Gappa and his team created a glass triptych illustrating the “Sower of the Seed” parable. It’s the second year in a row the studio’s won the prize.
For a man who seeks God in glass, sharing the gospel of glass blowing also means training disciples in the trade. Vetro has three full-time and two part-time glass blowers. “My entire staff is pretty much people who came in and experienced glass, and I taught them from the bottom up,” says Gappa. Travis Reid is now a full-time staff member but back in 2000 he was an interested observer who “showed up every day just to watch us work. We started putting him to work on little things here and there,” Gappa says.
Glass blower Randy Strait, who creates glass art at a studio in California, says Gappa taught him about glass as well as life lessons about things like hard work and focus. “I used to come up there and sweep the floors and do clean up, and then he would show us how to do things,” Strait says.
It’s that required focus, the beauty and even the serendipity of glass — each piece is unique and even the most skilled artisan can’t completely control the outcome — that draws Gappa to glass blowing.
“You have to work with a material that is constantly in motion, and you have to create and make decisions both aesthetically and physically right then and there.”
Article by Cathy Frisinger